Microsoft Office Visio 2007 is a drawing and diagramming application that helps make it easy for IT and business professionals to visualize, explore and communicate complex information.

Office Visio 2007 is available in two stand-alone editions: Office Visio Professional and Office Visio Standard.For a detailed comparison between the two editions, see the Microsoft Office Visio 2007 edition comparison.

New features and enhancements in Office Visio 2007 can dramatically increase your productivity by making it easy to create diagrams and visualize. Office Visio 2007 also includes improved methods for collaborating with other applications and new advanced features for developers and power users. See the

Easily connect Visio diagrams to data sources. Now with Office Visio Professional 2007, you not only can visualize systems, resources and processes, but also track and manage the data behind them. With the new Data Link functionality, you can more easily connect any Visio diagram to a wide variety of data sources, such as Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets, Access databases and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server lists. Associate all the shapes in a diagram with data using the new Automatic Link Wizard.

Display data with shapes in diagrams. Visualize complex information by showing data with shapes in a diagram. Display data as text, data bars, icons and color-coding — all using the new Data Graphics feature in Office Visio Professional 2007. For example, track data states by using warning and alert icons. Show variable data as progress bars, represent data that increases or decreases with arrows and view rankings as stars.

Track data trends and flag exceptions in PivotDiagrams. Visualize and explore your business data in hierarchical form showing data groups and totals by using the new PivotDiagram template in Office Visio Professional 2007. Drill down into complex data, display data using Data Graphics, dynamically create different views of data and better understand complex information. Insert PivotDiagrams into any Visio diagram to provide metrics and reports that help you track the progress of a process or system. Connect to a variety of data sources including Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft Office Project 2007 and Microsoft Office Excel 2007 to generate PivotDiagrams. More effectively track and report on resources and projects managed in Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office Project 2007 by generating visual reports from those programs in PivotDiagram form.

Get started creating diagrams faster. Quickly find the template you need by using large template previews, helpful template descriptions, the Featured Templates list at the top of many diagram categories and the Recent Templates list that provides a shortcut to your frequently used templates. Also, browse new sample data-connected diagrams in Office Visio Professional 2007 to get ideas for creating your own.

Easily create professional-looking diagrams. Office Visio 2007 takes all the guesswork out of choosing colors and formatting for diagrams. Using the new Theme feature, you can choose a built-in color or effect (text, fill, shadow, line and connector formatting) theme for your entire diagram with a single click. Or create your own custom themes to, for example, match your corporate branding. Office Visio 2007 uses the same built-in themes as other 2007 Microsoft Office system programs, so the colors in your Visio diagrams can match those used in your Word documents and PowerPoint presentations. Then, when you use your diagrams, documents and presentations together, you don't need to modify them to make them visually work well together.

Let Visio connect shapes for you. Connecting shapes has gotten even easier with Office Visio 2007. Now you don't need to draw connectors between shapes, distribute shapes or align shapes yourself; Visio does it for you using new AutoConnect functionality.

Communicate using diagrams that can be shared with a broad audience. Reach even more people and make your diagrams more portable by saving diagrams from Office Visio 2007 as PDF files or in the new Microsoft XPS file format (after you've installed the PDF or XPS add-in). Or attach diagrams to e-mail messages, and the recipient can preview them within Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, even if he or she doesn't have Office Visio 2007 installed. Make the diagrams you share more secure by adjusting settings in the new Trust Center.

General Features and Tools chart

Business and technical professionals who need to visualize, explore and communicate complex information in easy-to-understand diagrams benefit from using Office Visio 2007. Office Visio Standard 2007 can help business professionals easily create diagrams that illustrate their business operations. For technical users such as IT professionals, software developers, engineers and space planners, Office Visio Professional 2007 provides intuitive diagramming tools that can help visualize processes, resources, systems and the data behind.

While Office Word and Office PowerPoint provide basic diagramming capabilities, Office Visio 2007 is a dedicated diagramming tool with sophisticated drawing tools and templates that can help you easily create a broad range of diagrams and accomplish a wide range of tasks. In contrast to other Microsoft Office system programs, you can visualize data in Visio diagrams by connecting diagrams to data from external data sources. You can use Office Visio Professional 2007 to visually track data from multiple data sources, link the data to shapes in diagrams, display the data in your diagrams and even export the data to reports. IT and business professionals can visualize and explore complex tabular information with PivotDiagrams in Office Visio Professional 2007. You can also integrate data-connected diagrams with other Microsoft Office system files, such as Project schedules, Excel spreadsheets and SharePoint sites to easily and efficiently collaborate on projects and integrate information sources that are often separate but contain related information.

No. Unlike most graphics software programs, which require users to have artistic skills to create effective images, Office Visio 2007 is intended for people who don't want to draw freehand but still want to produce great-looking diagrams to convey important information. Quickly create diagrams with Office Visio 2007 by opening templates, dragging shapes onto the drawing page and then applying themes to add the finishing touches to a diagram.

You don't need to have Office Visio 2007 installed to view and print Visio diagrams. You can view and print them by using Visio Viewer in the Windows Internet Explorer Web browser. This comes in handy when you are distributing diagrams to a wide audience, many of whom might not have Visio installed. However, you must have Office Visio 2007 installed to create and modify diagrams created in Office Visio 2007.

Yes. In Office Visio 2007, you can open and use any Visio diagram created with a previous version of Visio. You can also open an Office Visio 2007 diagram in Visio 2003 because they both use the same file format. You can open an Office Visio 2007 diagram in Visio 2002 by first saving the diagram in the Visio 2002 file format. (Note: Version-specific functionality will be unavailable after saving your diagram in a previous version of Visio.)