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You are here: Home / Products / Rules Tools for Visio

Rules Tools for Visio

Add a user-interface to develop diagram Validation Rules in all but Standard editions of desktop Visio 2013+

Request a download for RulesTools from here

[NEW : Supports 64bit Visio]

View the RulesTools help file here:
Click

RulesTools is free for personal, non-commercial use. If you should like the product, then we invite you to donate just $29 / copy.  This will ensure that the product is developed further, and encourage us to provide more tools for you.





The new Validation API enables businesses to write custom validation rules for their own purposes.
Microsoft Visio 2010 Premium edition introduced provides built-in rule sets for flowcharts, BPMN diagrams and SharePoint Designer Workflows. They subsequently became part of Visio Professional and Visio Online Plan 2. However, Microsoft Visio does not provide a rule set developer interface for the analyzing, amending or creating rules. This Rules Tools add-in fills this gap by providing an extra group in the Process tab in Visio that allows users to analyze existing rules, display issues, and to export/import rule sets..

It is true that a picture is worth a thousand words, but the particular thousand words understood by each individual are more likely to be the same if the picture was created with commonly available rules. The structured diagramming features and Validation API in Visio 2010+ enable business diagramming rules to be developed, reviewed and deployed. The first diagramming types to have these rules applied to are process flowcharts, reminiscent of the vertical markets attacked by the first versions of Visio itself, but these rules can and will be extended beyond this discipline

Key Benefits

  • Review existing rule sets
  • Create, update or delete rules
  • Analyze and annotate issues
  • Export/import rule sets to/from XML
  • Standard and developer mode

Related Blog Articles

Update of Free Rules Tools for Visio Validation

Microsoft introduced Validation Rules in Visio 2010 Premium, and I was excited enough to write a book about it. Microsoft merged the Premium into the Professional edition in 2013, so I updated my book. I wrote an interface into the Visio Validation API as a free VSTO add-in, called Rules Tools. It was normal to…

Visio 2010 MVP Session videos reprise

Back in 2012, my fellow Visio MVPs, Scott Helmers and Chris Roth, and I recorded a series of 24 videos about Visio 2010. They were first hosted on Microsoft’s web site, then they put them up on YouTube, they they got deleted :-(. Well, we have managed to retrieve them, and put them back up…

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New Visio book out now!

After the trip to Hyderabad for the Visio MVP Conference, as described in my previous post, my wife and I went to Bangalore, Vadodara, and Mumbai. This gave me the chance to drop-in on Packt Publishing because this is the week that my new book is published ( see http://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-visio-2013-business-process-diagramming-and-validation/book ). The book’s title is…

New MSDN Article : Introduction to Validation Rules in Visio Premium 2010

I was planning to write a quick blog today, but it seems that Microsoft have moved all spaces.live.com bloggers to WordPress! Another new tool to learn …. In the meantime, I am pleased to announce that Microsoft have just published an article that I have written at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff847470.aspx This article goes through the new diagram validation feature…

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