Microsoft Visio 2007

Saving Your Visio Drawing

In a later section, we’ll explore the many different formats you could save your Visio drawing in, right now though, it’s important for you to understand how to save your Visio drawing. Saving often is the number one rule to reduce the chance of data loss. I can tell you from personal experience, it’s no fun to be working on a Visio drawing for some long period of time and lose part or all of it because I didn’t save frequently enough – don’t make the same mistake! Microsoft has built in some protection in the form of autosaves for Visio drawings, but it’s not perfect and does not beat regularly saving your drawing to reduce the chance for data loss.

How to Save Your Visio Drawing

1. There are three primary ways to save your file: Click on the File menu and select Save. Click the button on the toolbar. Press Ctrl+S on your keyboard. All three methods will bring up the Save as dialog box in Microsoft Visio.
2. Navigate to the folder you want to save your document in.
   
3. Change the file name and click the Save button.
4. Now that your file is saved once, clicking the save button in the toolbar, pressing Ctrl+S or selecting Save in the file menu will save the current version of your Visio drawing.

In a later section, you will learn about the two dozen file formats you can save your Visio drawing in.

Opening a Drawing

Once you have saved a document, or if you’ve received a document that someone else has created, you can open it in Visio to edit or view the drawing. Like most commands in Visio, there are multiple ways you can open a drawing:

1. Click the button in the toolbar.
2. Click the File menu and select Open.
3. Press Ctrl+O on your keyboard.

All of these commands opens the Open dialog box:

Navigate to the folder your drawing is in and click the Open button to open the file.

As you can see, there is an arrow on the Open button in the dialog box. Click on the arrow and you will see a list of options:

Open Original opens the original document, Open as Copy opens a new version of the document, and Open Read-Only opens a read-only copy of the document so you don’t accidentally overwrite the original Visio drawing.

In the Next Section

In the next section of this free Microsoft Visio 2007 tutorial, we’re going to explore working with Visio drawings. You will learn how to add shapes to a drawing, how to connect shapes, and some tips to work more efficiently in Visio.