Microsoft Visio 2013 Course

(SFX) Hi there and welcome to this Virtual Training Company course covering Microsoft's Visio 2013. This is the latest iteration of Microsoft's diagramming software that's part of the Microsoft Office suite of applications. This piece of software helps you make diagrams of all shapes and sizes. Mostly business diagrams, you can make org charts, you can document business processes, you can even document what's going on in an office in terms of the office furniture layout. My name is Brian Culp. I'll be your tour guide through this application. I have authored several courses for the Virtual Training Company including several covering Office 2013's suite of applications. Let's talk about where we're going in this course here. I'm going to switch to page two of my diagram to show you the roadmap for this course. Zoom in a little bit so you can see this. We're going to start by creating a new diagram with Visio, something maybe similar to what you're seeing right now. Once we create that new diagram in the introductory chapters we'll then move onto creating charts and formatting those charts and diagrams in Visio. We'll then continue on by linking Visio to data. We'll also report with Visio so we'll look at how to use Visio as a reporting mechanism. And then in the latter chapters of this course we'll start to wrap things up by sharing information in Visio and using it as a collaboration tool. So let's zoom back out once again and there's the roadmap, the general flow that we'll be following throughout this course. I'll be using the Professional version of Visio. There is actually three different versions and I'll discuss those right now as I switch over to Internet Explorer. I've navigated to the Microsoft Office store, you can do the same. You certainly don't have to right now. And it takes a little bit of doing but you can get to the Visio applications here if you sort by name Z to A, otherwise it's a little bit confusing because it's not really part of a standard suite within Office. So here they are. Visio Standard and the Visio professional. You can see the prices here. The big difference between the two is of course some of the capabilities. If you're just making standard diagrams, business diagrams you can probably get away with the Visio Standard edition. This is the starter edition; it includes 26 templates that are organized into 6 categories. So lots of shapes and stencils that you can use in Visio Standard create diagrams and link the shapes in diagrams. If you're talking about linking data, now you're talking about Visio Professional. So this includes 76 templates in eight categories plus it includes some collaboration capabilities that aren't available in Visio standard. And it also includes the ability to link data from outside sources into a Visio diagram. And we'll talk about that as we continue on. Now just know about me as a presenter, facilitator of this course. I view this as a conversation between you and I about this application. I try to present it the way I would if you were sitting here in the room with me and we were talking about Visio. I would first give you just a basic understanding of the application and then start to build on that basic understanding to learn some of the more advanced tips and techniques and capabilities of the tool. For the most part I recommend that you proceed through the course as it's laid out but I also don't pretend that everybody's going to approach it that way. You'll probably skip around and pick and choose the skills and techniques that are most relevant to what you want to do at that moment. But just know that again my style is pretty conversational. You're going to find tips in almost every lesson. Every lesson is probably composed of between 4 and 7 component techniques that I'm demonstrating and sometimes the later chapters, the lessons in those chapters will assume that you have seen something or heard something and are familiar with a skill that I have presented earlier. But that being said whether you view this course sequentially or you skip around and just pick and choose the lessons that are most relevant to you, you will learn a lot during our time together.