Microsoft® Office Visio® 2007 Inside Out

Working with Shape Data

During the Visio 2007 development cycles, the product’s designers realized that the drawings could have value beyond their worth as graphical representations. Part of what makes a Visio 2007 drawing valuable is the investment of time taken to create it, but a more significant part of a drawing’s value comes in the form of important, job-critical information that can be stored right in the drawing. When you view the shapes in a drawing as meaningful conveyors of information, rather than simply graphics, you can use Visio 2007 to model systems and processes. In this sense, for example, an organization chart is not just a chart, but also a visual representation of an employee database; and shapes can serve as records in ...