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Visio for M365

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How to migrate from Lucidchart to Visio

I am pleased to announce that I will be presenting a webinar on Thursday 10th October 2024 where I will be demonstrating how to convert many types of diagrams from Lucidchart to Visio, and keep their smartness. Over the 30 years that I have been using and developing solutions with Visio, I have seen many imitators come and go. Lucidchart, however, has carved out a niche over the years because it is available on Macs, whereas Visio only relatively recently became available in the web browser. Now that Microsoft provide a version of Visio as part of Microsoft 365, and more capable web versions for a subscription that is less than the equivalent Lucidchart cost. Moreover, Microsoft Visio Plan 2 has the ever popular Windows desktop edition that has many more features and can be used as a design studio for diagrams to be used in the web editions.

The following examples are conversions from Lucidchart to Visio Plan 1.

  • Org Chart
  • Configuration Management
  • Cluster Chart
  • AWS Web Application
  • Flow Chart
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My new book on Visualizing Processes with Microsoft Visio has launched

Back in the early 1990s, there was an application called ABC Flowcharter that was the market leader for diagramming business flowcharts, but some of the brains behind Aldus PageMaker saw an opportunity to create something smarter, and left to write the Visio product, with the stated aim to overtake ABC Flowcharter within 2 years. They did it in just 18 months and Visio expanded to cover more types of diagramming, especially organization charts and network diagramming. Visio became the default vector-based, data-diagramming application for the desktop, and so Microsoft acquired the company in 2000, who started to integrate it with Microsoft Office applications. Many imitators on the desktop tried to emulate Visio, but most fell by the wayside. There were constant requests for Visio to work on Apple Macs, but Microsoft resisted making a Mac specific version, and instead started to make Visio work in a web-browser, so it can work anywhere on any modern device. There are literally millions of lines of code on Visio, so it was never going to be straightforward or easy, but now we do have a light edition of Visio provided to all M365 business subscribers, and two extra subscription levels for more features and capabilities. We still have desktop Visio Standard and Professional, but the edition that straddles both the desktop and web is Visio Plan 2. It has some desktop only features delivered via web-services, and an enhanced browser-based editing experience. Visio Plan 2 is the edition for heavy or advanced users, but any of the desktop editions can be viewed as a design studio for content that can be used by the browser users because of Visio’s unique ShapeSheet feature that contains Excel-like formulas to control the properties of the shapes. Almost all of these formulas work in the web browser, but desktop Visio is required to write the formulas initially. This means that powerful customizations are possible without any web-scripting, and achievable by anyone who can write formulas in Excel!

So, this new book focuses on the original driver for Visio, process flowcharts, and explains how the different Visio editions can be used to create, edit, collaborate, comment, present, automate, export them, and finally how to customize them. Find out more at Visualize Complex Processes with Microsoft Visio!

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Binding Visio and Excel with Data Visualizer

I re-vamped some of my content about the Visio Data Visualizer add-in for Excel in my last post, so I thought I should expand a bit more on the Data Visualizer feature in Visio for Desktop (Visio Plan 2) and Excel for Desktop. I have described it in detail in previous posts, but I never published the process diagram I created for the Data Visualizer Wizard in Visio. So, I thought I would use it to demonstrate a few cool features of Visio for Desktop.

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Editing Visio Data Visualizer in Excel

I have previously described how to use the Visio Data Visualizer add-in in Excel, but I didn’t make it clear how you can edit the diagram created if you have a Visio license. So, I have recorded three short videos to briefly explain this.

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Custom Shapes in Visio in M365 and Web

Microsoft recently announced the ability to access the shapes in the document stencil whilst using Visio for Web … if you have a Visio Plan 2 license. So, I thought I would make it clear what that means for custom shape developers. There are now three licenses that provide the ability to edit Visio diagrams in the web browser.

  • Visio in Microsoft 365 – now provided to all commercial M385 subscribers, it is a light version of Visio for Web
  • Visio Plan 1 – a subscription that provides Visio for Web in a browser, with more templates and features than Visio in M365
  • Visio Plan 2 – a subscription that provides Visio for Desktop on Windows, in addition to Visio for Web in a browser anywhere

Typically, Visio solution developers create smart custom shapes that are deployed as masters in a stencil. None of the licenses currently provide the ability to deploy custom stencils for use by Visio in the web browser, however Visio Plan 2 license holders can access custom masters in the document stencil. This increases the ability of these users to use custom Visio documents on non-Windows devices. However, Visio in M365 users cannot edit Visio documents with custom masters, and Visio Plan 1 users cannot access the local document stencil.

  • Editing a Visio document with custom masters with M365
  • Editing a Visio document with custom masters with Plan 1
  • Editing a Visio document with custom masters with Plan 2
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Making Custom Shapes for Visio for M365

I recently revised my chess and checkerboard Visio documents to work in Visio for the Web (Visio Plan 1), but now that Microsoft are providing a version of Visio free to M365 business users, I need to make some further adjustment to get them to work for these users who do not have a Visio Plan 1 or Plan 2 license. The problem is that Microsoft restricts the capabilities of the free version by white-listing Visio masters. So, the answer is to delete the masters … then the Visio document becomes editable in Visio for M365!

So, what is the downside?

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