Book Image

Visualize Complex Processes with Microsoft Visio

By : David J Parker, Šenaj Lelić
Book Image

Visualize Complex Processes with Microsoft Visio

By: David J Parker, Šenaj Lelić

Overview of this book

Every business has process flows, but not all of them are fully described to or verified for accuracy with each stakeholder. This not only presents a risk for business continuity but also removes the ability to make insightful improvements. To make these complex interactions easy to grasp, it’s important to describe these processes visually using symbology that everybody understands. Different parts of these flows should be collaboratively developed and stored securely as commercial collateral. Visualize Complex Processes with Microsoft Visio helps you understand why it is crucial to use a common, systematic approach to document the steps needed to meet each business requirement. This book explores the various process flow templates available in each edition of Microsoft Visio, including BPMN. It also shows you how to use them effectively with the help of tips and techniques and examples to reduce the time required for creating them, as well as how you can improve their integration and presentation. By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered the skills needed to create data-integrated business flowcharts with Microsoft Visio, learned how to effectively use these diagrams collaboratively, but securely, and understood how to integrate them with other M365 apps, including Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Power Automate.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Reviewing existing selected process master shapes

If we click the Edit Master Shape … option in the right-click menu of the Process master in our Document Stencil area, we will see that the Shape Data section looks like this:

Figure 10.10 – The Shape Data section of a Process shape

Figure 10.10 – The Shape Data section of a Process shape

The first thing we should notice is that the formulas are all blue text, whereas they were black in Figure 10.10. This is because inherited formulas and values are colored black but those that are not inherited are colored blue.

Hopefully, you have noticed that this section defines what is displayed in the Shape Data window. This is an optional section of the ShapeSheet, which means that it does not exist on all shapes, unlike some other sections that need to exist for Visio to work and cannot be deleted. The Shape Data section used to be called Custom Properties originally (and referred to as Prop in formulas) and can have many rows, which can be named for...