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)

Using themes to enhance the appearance of pages

We looked at some parts of the Design ribbon tab in the previous chapter, but now we will look in more detail at the Themes gallery. A diagram without a theme, as in the following screenshot of desktop Visio, can look unfinished and uninviting to some audiences, so we often enhance the look by using a theme:

Figure 7.1 – A cross-functional flowchart with no theme applied

Figure 7.1 – A cross-functional flowchart with no theme applied

Themes are applied on a page-by-page basis, so it is possible to have different themes on different pages in the same document, but there can only be one theme per page.

There are a number of built-in themes available in the gallery, and we may decide to use a different theme on the same diagram at different stages of the development of a process flowchart. For example, we may use one of the Hand Drawn themes initially to convey the intention that the diagram is still being analyzed and change to one of the themes in the Professional...