Microsoft Visio 2007

Creating a New Visio Drawing

Microsoft Visio 2007 allows IT and business professionals to take complex written processes and tables and turn them into easy to understand drawings. These drawings allow other professionals to quickly understand a complex process or data. Visio is designed to allow you to take these complex concepts and create a drawing which everyone can understand. Visio can help impact your business by allowing more information to be shared, complex systems to be understood and troubleshooted, and processes to be identified and improved. Properly used, Visio can make a big impact on your firm’s bottom line.

Creating a new Visio drawing is the first step you take to illustrating your process, diagram, or flowchart. In this section of the free Microsoft Visio tutorial, you will learn the basic file commands for Visio including creating, opening, and saving a Visio drawing.

Creating a Blank Drawing

Everything starts with a blank drawing and there are two ways you can create one: creating a simple blank canvas with preloaded shapes in the Shapes panel, or as you will learn in the next section, creating a Visio drawing from template. There are eight categories for your to select from when creating a new drawing and many items within each category for you to select. Several of the items appear in multiple categories.

We recommend creating a new diagram using one of these items as the shapes are preloaded in the Shapes panel and you don’t have to search for the rights ones. You can always search for and add panels to the Shapes panel, but starting with this preset collections of objects to use can only help as you begin to use Microsoft Visio 2007.

There are a couple of ways to create a blank drawing. We’ll show you two ways to create a blank Visio drawing.

Create a Blank Visio Drawing Using the File Menu

1. Click on the File menu.
2. Select New.
   
3. Select a category you want to create a new drawing based on. For example, select Business. Under Business, select Basic Flowchart.
4. A new drawing will be created and stencils related to Basic Flowchart will automatically be opened.
   

Create a Blank Visio Drawing Using the Toolbar

1. Click on the arrow to the right of the new document toolbar button ().
2. This will open a menu of pre-defined blank drawings with appropriate stencils, like this:
   
3. Select the category and the type of drawing you want to create.