The 21st century is the age of multimedia. Our attention spans, and those of our audiences, are shrinking to the point where even the snappy sound bite takes too much time to take in. Microsoft Visio is a visual application, available from Microsoft that helps to diagram and outline a variety of schematics for organizations and their employees.

What is Microsoft Visio?

Available as a standalone application or as an add-on to a Microsoft Office 365 subscription, Visio is like all the other packages in Office, except much more intense. There are few graphic tasks that Visio performs that can't be achieved by MS PowerPoint, Word, or Excel, or even Project, it's just that Visio does them more easily and with a lot more style.

In other words, MS Visio, part of the MS Office suite, is a diagramming and vector graphics application. To the rest of us, it's a tool for creating cool diagrams, from the simple to the sublimely complicated. Unlike other packages in the Office suite, the name Visio is neither intuitive nor easy to remember.

What Visio Does

MS Visio tackles all known graphics applications and dozens more that haven't even been invented yet. You can use it to bash out a flowchart or organizational chart in a fraction of the time and anguish that you could execute the same task in either PowerPoint or Excel. The Visio result will be visibly more slick and professional, too. Open a new document in Visio, and you will be presented with the following options:

• Flowcharts
• Organizational Charts
• Route Maps
• Process Diagrams
• Gantt Charts
• Timelines
• Network Diagrams
• Brainstorming
• BPMN Diagram
• Data Flow Diagram
• And many more

With easy access to more than 200 shapes, a variety of templates and stencils and a status bar that can help the user move between and within diagrams, users can produce professional and appealing diagrams within minutes.

Who uses Visio?

Only a fraction of those people who could benefit from using Visio actually do use it, or even know it's available. The main users of Visio are business professionals. Web developers use templates to produce beautiful wireframes of their mobile apps. Project managers apply Visio to produce the Gantt charts that keep the team on schedule. On social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, everybody is now a graphic illustrator. Visio helps you produce memes that will have you competing with the most powerful influencers.

People who don't yet use Visio but could and should

There is really no one in or even out of cyberspace that could not benefit from using Visio. If your organization has a staff restaurant, your chef can use Visio to produce attractive weekly and monthly menus. The route mapping function can be used to integrate the path to your door on an invitation to a corporate function.

Why should employers send their employees to training for it?

Getting started on Visio is easy. Part of the beauty of the package is that you can produce credible results within literally moments of opening your first new document. Anybody who grew up using MS products will feel at home with it. If you get stuck, you can type a question into the help box or search for answers to your questions online. But to get the full value from Visio, it takes instruction from someone who is experienced with all the bells and whistles lurking behind the icons.

Sending people for training in Visio need not be expensive. A simple one-day course conducted onsite could have your employees qualified to:

• Navigate the Visio interface
• Enhance a basic diagram
• Create an organizational chart
• Produce a flowchart
• Create a route map
• Create a process diagram

One of the first lessons involves familiarization with the Visio interface and how to access help. Next, students are taught how to add and manipulate shapes, add and format text, and change the stacking order. These steps lead to more advanced topics including flow charts, page styles, process and workflow diagrams, and cross-functional flowcharts and complex organizational diagrams. Once your people get trained on Visio, they will be coming up with even more ways they can use it to deliver value to your operations.

Do your Employees Need Visio Training?

If you want your employees to learn about Visio, why not connect with us today. We are a nationally recognized leader in developing, producing, and implementing excellent information training and certification. In addition, Infotec creates solutions for our clients and helping them to instill efficiency.

For more information about Infotec or any of our programs click here: http://www.infotectraining.com/ or https://ops.infotecpro.com/course_schedule/course_schedule.cfm.