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)

Exporting data to Microsoft Excel for integration

Our process flowcharts are a precious source of knowledge about our business, and we have learned how we can create diagrams automatically using the Data Visualizer feature, as described in Chapter 5, and how we can update a linked Excel table from the Visio flowchart. However, we may not have created our flowchart from an Excel table, or we may have used a query in Excel as a source, in which case, we are unable to update with Data Visualizer. We may want to check or analyze the data in our flowchart diagrams or integrate the data with another app or system, such as Power BI, as discussed in the next section.

Creating a report definition

We have previously looked at some parts of the Review ribbon tab in previous chapters, but now we will concentrate on the Shape Reports button. This button will open the Reports dialog, as shown here:

Figure 9.10 - The Review | Shape Reports dialog

Figure 9.10 - The Review | Shape Reports dialog

This dialog will...