This book is all about Visio as visual information. Shapes in Visio are obviously graphical, but they contain data and hyperlinks. There is no doubt that the richest experience of a Visio document is with the Visio application. However, this is not always possible, so an alternative experience is often necessary. Some of these methods can provide access to the data and hyperlinks, either fully or partly, but some methods reduce Visio to providing purely graphical output. Perhaps this is when Data Graphics are at their most important because they visualize the information without the viewer needing to select a shape.

There are also times when the data in shapes is sensitive, and providing access is not desirable.