Visualize Complex Processes with Microsoft Visio: A guide to visually creating, communicating, and collaborating business processes efficiently

Streamline your business by creating clear, concise process diagrams with Microsoft Visio, and share them securely for viewing, reviewing, and collaboration

Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free PDF eBook

Key Features

• Learn built-in diagram types or create custom ones to describe flow steps effectively
• Unlock the skills and techniques needed to efficiently and speedily capture and communicate complex flows
• Understand how to store securely, integrate with other apps, and import and export flow steps

Book Description

Every business has process flows, but not all of them are fully described to or verified for accuracy with each stakeholder. This not only presents a risk for business continuity but also removes the ability to make insightful improvements. To make these complex interactions easy to grasp, it’s important to describe these processes visually using symbology that everybody understands. Different parts of these flows should be collaboratively developed and stored securely as commercial collateral.

Visualize Complex Processes with Microsoft Visio helps you understand why it is crucial to use a common, systematic approach to document the steps needed to meet each business requirement. This book explores the various process flow templates available in each edition of Microsoft Visio, including BPMN. It also shows you how to use them effectively with the help of tips and techniques and examples to reduce the time required for creating them, as well as how you can improve their integration and presentation.

By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered the skills needed to create data-integrated business flowcharts with Microsoft Visio, learned how to effectively use these diagrams collaboratively, but securely, and understood how to integrate them with other M365 apps, including Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Power Automate.

What you will learn

• Choose an appropriate flowchart diagram type to describe process steps
• Develop the skills to efficiently use Visio to draw process flowcharts
• Discover how to create process flows diagrams to meet the BPMN standard
• Find out how to synchronize Excel tables with Visio process flowcharts
• Store flowcharts that can also be used for collaboration securely
• Understand how to export flowcharts and data to other M365 apps
• Discover how Visio ShapeSheet functions can increase productivity

Who this book is for

If you’re a manager, analyst, or designer of business processes, then this book will help you create professional process diagrams effectively and consistently to improve the accuracy of communication and facilitate impactful insights. This book will also be useful for beginners or power users who are seeking tips and techniques to capture process flows from context and customize diagrams to meet academic as well as corporate standards.

Table of Contents

1. Product Information Document
2. Choosing the Correct Business Process Diagram Type
3. Choosing the Best Visio Edition for Our Needs
4. Learning to Manually Create Process Flow Diagrams
5. Using Visio for Desktop with BPMN
6. Utilizing Data Sources to Create and Enrich Business Process Diagrams
7. Learn How to Diagram Efficiently
8. Preparing Diagrams for Presentation and Collaboration
9. Securing and Providing Access to Diagrams
10. Integrating Visio with Other Microsoft Apps
11. Customizing Master Shapes and Templates
12. Improving the Provided Flowchart Shapes

David J Parker's background has been in data visualization ever since he struggled to produce lists of hospital equipment from Computer Aided Design models of buildings as a budding architect in the '80s. He moved into building and infrastructure asset management in the late '80s using a Unix system and gradually migrated to Windows-based systems throughout the '90s.

He became a European Business partner of Visio Corporation in 1996 and presented the database-linked Visio solutions that he was providing merchant banks in London and New York with at several international conferences. David started bVisual Ltd. in 1998, which provides Visio-based solutions to various industries, and became a Silver-level Microsoft partner.

He has been a Microsoft MVP (Visio) for the last 12 years and has helped Microsoft Corp, UK and Western Europe, by providing Visio solutions, training, website content, and presentations. David has had several books on Visio published and has been presenting Visio/SharePoint integration courses for many years for Microsoft Western Europe, from Oslo in the North down to Lisbon in the South. He has presented at SQL and SharePoint Saturday conferences and writes a regular blog for people interested in Microsoft Visio.

Šenaj Lelić has worked in IT since 1991, and studied economy at the university of Munich (special studies: strategic management and software based Business Process management). Starting with BORLAND, he went on to work with Visio Corporation in 1996. Since then he has worked on many visualization solutions for different customers. When Visio was acquired by Microsoft in 2000 his focus shifted to Microsoft.NET and SharePoint, extending to support technologies such as SQL Server and Microsoft Teams.

One consistent activity has been the creation and planning/architecture of BPM solutions and technologies - always using Visio as the graphical engine, but extending with SQL Server and SharePoint to create powerful but easy to use BPM solutions.