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Microsoft Visio 2007 Tutorials

Introducing Visio 2007 / Understanding Visio 2007 Product Editions

Subtitles of the Movie

I think it's important for us to spend a few minutes together looking at the Visio product, perhaps a little bit about its history and definitely some more information on differentiating the different Visio 2007 editions. What you're looking at right now is the Microsoft Visio entry at Wikipedia.org and what this tells us is that Microsoft Visio is a diagramming software for Microsoft Windows; that is to say we can't use Visio on Mac OS 10 or Linux Unix, although there are open-source alternatives to Visio and Visio uses vector graphics, which involves mathematical computation, arcs and lines and so forth, rather than what's called raster graphics, which involve bitmap images, or pixel-based images. Now then, it's important for us to understand that Visio's been around for a long time. Microsoft acquired Visio from a company called Visio Corporation in 2000 and I've actually used Visio ever since Visio was a property of that company. If we scroll down here and we see the version history began with version 5.0, there were several different editions and then in 2000 Microsoft bought the product and it became Visio 2000 and Visio 2002, also called Visio XP. The previous version was Visio 2003, and now we have Visio 2007. Alright. Another site you should be familiar with is the Office.Microsoft.com site. This is also called Microsoft Office Online and rather than try to give you the URL, which is rather complicated, I would recommend that you simply do a Google search for Microsoft Visio and you can come here quickly enough. You can learn a tremendous amount about Visio or all Office 2007 apps by coming to this place. In particular, there's a page at Microsoft Office Online called Office Visio 2007 Edition Comparison. And again, you can just do a search at Microsoft.com for this and what this is telling us is that in the 2007 release, instead of several different editions, which was a weakness in my opinion of previous versions of Visio, namely the end-user or the technical professional was never quite sure which edition to purchase, here we have just Standard 2007 and Visio Professional 2007. You're probably wondering what is the difference between these two versions, besides price. Well, on this page there's a really nifty comparison here and you'll see that the products are largely the same. If we scroll down here, we'll see the differences between Visio Standard and Visio Professional are basically additional templates, such as floor plan templates, network templates and so forth, and you also have the ability to use external data, which we'll get into later in this tutorial series. Bottom line, if you're an ordinary end user, that is to say you're not, say, an IT professional or an architect or a drafter, then you may be just fine with Visio Standard. Otherwise you'd probably want to shell out the extra money for the Professional version. Final note about licensing, again, you may not care about this if the software's provided to you by your employer, but like most Microsoft end-user applications, you can either purchase the retail SKU, also known as the single-user license, or each copy of the software can be installed on one machine and you have one product ID for each installation. Alternatively, in larger organizations, you'd set up what's called a volume licensing agreement with Microsoft where you pay a flat fee and are able to install Visio on as many workstations as you wish within your company using the same product code for all installations. So there you go. That's the basic differentiation between the two main versions, or editions, of Microsoft Visio 2007.

Tutorial Information

Course: Microsoft Visio 2007
Author: Tim Warner
SKU: 33791
ISBN: 1-934743-03-8
Release Date: 2007-09-06
Duration: 10 hrs / 152 lessons
Captions: For Online University members only
Compatibility: Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux
QuickTime 7, Flash 8

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