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)

Embedding processes in Microsoft Power BI for interaction

Power BI is a great app for analyzing or interacting with live data, and Microsoft provides Visio Visual , which can be added from the Visualizations | Get More Visuals… dialog. This gives us the ability to add pages from Visio documents into Power BI reports. This means that we can overlay live statistics from a process that might be in use, for example, the count of the number of help desk calls at particular parts of the flow. We have been using the process steps for Data Visualizer so far in this chapter, so we will use the Excel table exported from Visio in the previous section.

We can display the data in Power BI to add text labels to each flowchart step or to color the shapes by value in Visio Visual.

You can download a free guide to using Visio and Power BI together from https://bvisual.net/resources/power-up-your-visio-diagrams/, and we will learn some key techniques in this section.

Preparing a Visio...