Subtitles of the Movie

In the business world, as you probably know, document compatibility is big; that is to say just because you have a license for Microsoft Visio, doesn't mean that the recipient of your drawing will have the same. Now, we'll talk about the Visio 2007 viewer in another lesson in this tutorial series; however I do want to make sure that you know how to save a Visio diagram as an alternate file format to help other people to be able to see your documents that you exert blood, sweat and tears creating. So, how do we save a Visio drawing from its native dot vsd format to another file format? It's actually very easy. Let me show you how that works. First, of course, you open the document in Visio 2007. Second, we open the file menu and select save as. Now, let me close out of this save as dialog for just a moment. In a previous movie, when we talked about opening and closing documents, I mentioned that when the file is initially saved it doesn't matter whether we select save or save as from the file menu. However once a document has been saved, there is a difference between save and save as. If we just hit control S or use the save button on the standard tool bar or click file save, that's simply going to update any changes since the last time that document was saved. If you want to save a file in a different location and or with a different name and or under a different extension, then, and only then, we would open the file menu and select save as. This does bring up the save as dialog box that we've seen before. We would, first of all, want to browse to where we want the file located and next we would choose if we wanted to, an alternate file name. I'll just leave this alone for now. The key to saving a Visio file as an alternate file format lies in the save as type drop-down list box. Now, the default, of course, is the native Vision vsd format. But watch what happens when we open the drop-down list. We see an impressive number of alternate file types. For instance, what if we were sharing a file with a user who was using what's called a down-level version of Visio? Like Visio 2002? Well what we could do is simply select Visio 2002 drawing as our type and share this file with him or her. Let's see what else we have in the save as type drop-down. We have AutoCAD native format. We have web page if we're going to publish this file to a web server. We have several graphical formats. And what's not in here, notably, is the Adobe Portable Document format, or pdf. You can either obtain an open-source pdf printer or purchase a license for Adobe Acrobat, the full version, and actually print or create a pdf version of a Visio file. But here we don't have that ability natively. We just have what's in this list. We can save to just an xml format, which is about as basic as you can get and is about as understandable by different systems as you can get. Or finally, like I think I already mentioned, we have graphical formats. Now, this is not going to provide any bling or interactivity, but it will at least allow our destination reader to view our work. So why don't we, in this example, choose the jpg format. So I'll save this file to the desktop as IT asset drawing.jpg, click save. Some of these alternate file types have additional options that we can set here. Looks like we have color options, quality options, transformation options and so forth. I'm going to just click OK and accept those defaults. And then we'll close out of Visio. So here is the end result. File IT asset drawing.jpg that we share with our colleague, our boss, whomever. And if we double click that jpg file, after a moment's pause, we should see that file open in our default file handler for jpg files. So there you go. So there's our IT asset drawing as we rendered in the jpg graphics format. So there it is. Using the save as command allows us to transform a Visio document into a down-level or alternate file format that we can use to share with our customers, clients or colleagues.