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)

Adding callouts for annotations

We sometimes need to add extra annotations to our diagrams, which could be done by just adding text blocks onto a page, but often these notes are related to specific process shapes. In this case, we can add callout shapes to our process diagram that are associated with these process flowcharts and BPMN shapes. The two shapes should remain glued to each other when they are moved. Interestingly, Visio’s desktop and web versions provide quite different Callouts stencils. In either case, it is generally good practice to glue callouts to their target shapes because they keep the relationship between them, and code could be written to export all of the steps and their associated callout information later if required.

Getting Callout shapes in Visio for the web

The callout shapes in the web version merely have a leader that can be repositioned near a target shape. However, searching for callout displays a horizontal and vertical of a Simple callout...