Microsoft Visio 2010 : Tips for Creating Process and Flowchart Diagrams

Working with Autoresizing Flowchart Shapes

Many of the masters on the Basic Flowchart Shapes and the various BPMN stencils have a nifty behavior that automatically expands the shapes vertically as you type in more text. This feature is useful and cool, but it exhibits some confusing quirks:

  • The shapes have two custom right-click actions: Resize with Text and Set to Default Size. You can see them in the menu shown in Figure 1

     

    Figure 1. Autoexpanding flowchart shapes and their mysterious right-click actions. The right-most shape has been manually resized by the user, so both menu items appear.

  • Resize with Text resets the autostretch behavior—if it has been deactivated. For example, manually stretching the shape turns off autostretch. Right-click to turn it back on.

  • Set to Default Size restores the shape to its original width and height. I actually wish more shapes had this behavior built in.

  • The menu items appear only when they can be asserted. For example, Resize with Text isn’t visible if the shape is already resizing with text.

  • If you copy a shape from one on the page, instead of dragging from the stencil, the autostretch behavior gets deactivated for some reason. Furthermore, if you right-click this copy, you don’t see the Resize with Text option until the text in the shape exceeds the height of the shape. Strange.

  • Resetting a shape to its default size doesn’t reactivate Resize with Text. And Resize with Text reappears only after it’s too late—that is, when the text is bigger than the shape.

Odd as the behavior is, it seems less ridiculous after you’ve tried it yourself. Take a moment to play with the flowchart shapes, fill them with text, remove the text, and copy them. Just make sure that you right-click after every modification and notice the items that appear or disappear from the top of the menu.

Connecting to Decision Shapes

Visio’s Re-layout Page functionality helps make sense of connected diagrams that have turned into spaghetti. However, Visio’s layout algorithms are applied rather academically; they don’t take into account what people typically do with particular shapes.

A prime example is the Decision diamond shape used for conditional branching. If you’re like me, you probably use the Decision shape like the first example in Figure 2.

 

Figure 2. Autolayout does silly things to Decision shapes in flowcharts. The (X) symbols in the third example show where connectors are attached to specific connection points using point-to-point glue.

 

All these shapes are connected using dynamic glue, and everything looks fine, unless you click Re-layout Page on the Design tab.

The result is the middle flowchart in Figure 2. Although evenly spaced and orderly, the flowchart is very difficult to read and doesn’t follow the traditional right-angled layout that folks traditionally use with decision diamonds.

The third example in Figure 2 partially fixes the situation. The Yes and No connectors now use point-to-point glue to explicitly connect to the bottom and right sides of the Decision shape.

Point-to-point glue doesn’t solve the problem entirely, but it does result in a more readable flowchart.

If you really want to keep the nice, right-angled branching that you started with, forget Re-layout Page altogether and rely on the Dynamic Grid and Auto Align & Space to keep things tidy but where you want them. Or be prepared to do some cleanup after clicking re-layout.

Creating Subprocesses to Drill Down to Details

When a flowchart gets too complicated, you might consider simplifying it using subprocesses. This means moving a series of steps to another page, replacing them with a Subprocess shape in the original flow, and then linking that Subprocess shape to the details page.

In this way, users can easily understand the top level of a flow but still drill down to explore the finer details on the subprocess page if they want.

Creating subprocesses is highly automated in Visio Premium, but Standard and Pro users can still do it by hand. Yes, Using Microsoft Visio 2010 is here to save the day and show you how to create subprocess systems in just a few steps

Creating Subprocesses the “Hard Way”
1.

Select a set of shapes in an existing flowchart that you want to turn into a subprocess.

 

2.

Cut them from the diagram. The shapes disappear into the clipboard ether, and Visio removes any dangling connectors.

 

3.

Click the Insert Page tab to create a new page and give it the name of the subprocess.

 

4.

Paste the cut shapes onto the new page.

 

5.

On the original page, add a Subprocess shape in the gaping hole left by the shapes you cut in Step 2.

 

6.

Type the name of the subprocess into this shape. It’s a good idea to match this text to the name of the new page.

 

7.

Add incoming and outgoing connectors to the Subprocess shape, so that it is connected to the original flow.

 

8.

Give the Subprocess shape a hyperlink that links to the subprocess page.

 

a. Select the Subprocess shape.

 

b. Press Ctrl+K to quickly get to the Hyperlinks dialog. (Or use Insert, Links, Hyperlink.)

 

c. Use the Subaddress Browse button to choose the subprocess page as the link’s target. Visio calls links within the same document subaddresses. The top-most Address field is for links to external documents and web pages

 

d. Add a meaningful description if the name of the subprocess page isn’t enough to understand where the link will take you.

 

e. Click OK. Your Subprocess shape now has a hyperlink that jumps to the subprocess page.

 

9.

Congratulate yourself on saving $200–$500 by not purchasing Visio Premium!

 

If you didn’t save any money and have Visio Premium, be sure to check out the Process tab on your more-expensive Ribbon. There you’ll find the Subprocess group, which contains three buttons for your subprocessing enjoyment:

  • Create New—Creates a new page with a name that matches the text of the selected shape. The shape gets a hyperlink to the new page. You then diagram the detailed steps of the subprocess on the newly added page. 
  • Link to Existing—Links a selected shape to an existing page that already contains detailed process steps. This is essentially creates a hyperlink straight from the drop-down list. Very convenient! 
  • Create from Selection—Does everything you did in the preceding Let Me Try It with one click of the mouse. It copies selected shapes to a new page, replaces them with a Subprocess shape, and links this shape to the new page. It even connects the new Subprocess shape to the original flowchart. However, you have to manually change the name of the subprocess page and the text of the Subprocess shape. Microsoft should have popped up a dialog to ask for the name of the subprocess. Nevertheless, this is a huge timesaver for you frequent flowcharters.

Managing Swimlanes and Phases in Cross-functional Flowcharts

Cross-functional flowcharts provide a useful variation on the age-old flowchart by letting you categorize steps in lanes and phases. They have some user-interface enhancements that make life easier but might throw off your Visio intuition a little bit.

Adding Lanes and Phases

You can add swimlanes to a diagram in several ways. You can drag Swimlane masters from the stencil, click Insert, Swimlane on the Cross-functional Flowchart contextual Ribbon tab, or click the blue insertion arrows that appear when you pause the mouse pointer over either end of a swimlane, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Swimlanes are list items, so inserting and reordering them are a snap. Resizing lanes and phases is simply a matter of mousing over a division until the parallel-bars-and-arrows cursor appears.

 

A swimlane is a container, so flowchart shapes inside a lane move with it when you reposition it. The Title shape is a container, too. However, it is specially designed to contain a list of swimlanes.

You add phases by dragging the Separator master or by clicking Insert, Separator on the CFF tab. Phases are not list items, so they are more difficult to reorder. If you make them wider or narrower, shapes that come after will shift forward or backward automatically, which saves the need to manually adjust shapes.

Resizing Lanes and Phases

Unlike most Visio shapes, you don’t have to select lanes or phases to resize them. Instead of pulling on selection handles, you can resize them similar to the way you resize rows and columns in Excel. Pause the mouse pointer over any division until you see the reposition break cursor, which appears as two parallel bars and two arrows. Figure 8.3 is a composite which shows three examples.

When you add a separator to create a phase, Visio divides the available space at the point you drop the shape. When you widen a phase, however, everything after the phase shifts, too. This often causes the flowchart to spill over onto a new page. If you want to keep to one page, you have to go to the end and make the last phase narrower to compensate. Not hard, but potentially annoying.

Contextual Ribbon Tab

The Cross-functional Flowchart tab has some neat functionality that you should explore. There’s a style gallery for quickly changing the overall appearance of the chart. You can reverse the direction of flow or transpose the whole diagram between the horizontal and the vertical. You can save space by turning off the title bar, and you set text for each lane so that it is right-side-up and easier to read.

Numbering Shapes

If you like to have your process steps numbered, automated help is hiding in the wings. The Number Shapes add-on has myriad options to help you get your numbering just right.

You find the add-on by going to View, Macros, Add-ons, Visio Extras, Number Shapes. The add-on presents a single screen with a General and Advanced tab, both full of useful options.

You can number your shapes automatically or manually click on them in the order you want. You can set the step interval, define a prefix, opt to continue numbering new shapes added to the diagram, number shapes only on specific layers, and choose whether to add the numbering before or after the existing shape text.

Validating Diagrams

If your wallet is feeling empty and you are the proud owner of Visio Premium, you have yet another bit of powerful technology at your disposal: the ability to validate diagrams for correctness and consistency.

Figure 4 shows a simple flowchart that has a few mistakes. The Process tab’s Check Diagram button is expanded to reveal that you are validating the diagram using the Flowchart rules set.

Figure 4. This basic flowchart has a few defects. Visio 2010 Premium knows what they are!

Visio 2010 Premium comes with three rule sets, which are loaded with the corresponding templates: Flowchart Rule Set, BPMN, and SharePoint Workflow.

Custom rule sets can be built and imported into documents. They don’t even have to be process-diagram specific. Visio validation is still in its infancy, but huge potential exists here for creating valuable Visio-based solutions.

Business Process Diagrams (BPMN) and SharePoint Workflows

If you have the Premium edition of Visio 2010, be advised that you have two advanced flowcharting templates at your disposal. The BPMN Diagram and Microsoft SharePoint Workflow templates both appear under the Flowchart category in the Choose a Template page.

BPMN Diagrams

The BPMN Diagram template supports the Business Process Modeling Notation 1.2 standard. The shapes that come with this template not only have the proper BPMN look, but also contain appropriate Shape Data fields. They also have custom right-click menu items for fine-tuning shapes to more specialized purposes. All this, along with the BPMN rule validation discussed in the preceding section, and Visio 2010 Premium goes a long way toward helping you create BPMN-compliant diagrams.

SharePoint Workflows

With the SharePoint Workflow template, you can diagram a SharePoint workflow in Visio. Then, using the Export button in the SharePoint Workflow group on the Process tab, you can export your work to a VWI (Visio Workflow Interchange format) file. This VWI file can be imported and understood by SharePoint Designer 2010, where you can further edit the workflow and finally run it in SharePoint.