[Novalug] Fwd: What makes Linux great... Now Visio OT

John B. Holmblad jholmblad@aol.com
Thu Jun 19 13:08:30 EDT 2008


John,

re: icons, yes, in fact, I sometimes open Visio to "borrow" icons for  
Powerpoint presentations.

I came to understand the power of Visio when I decided on my own, 
without reading any documentation,  to create a reasonably accurate (in 
terms of measurements) lighting and structured wiring plan for a small 
home renovation. It took me several iterations but by the time I was 
finished I had a work product that  the electrical contractor whom I 
hired a) was able to work from, and b) became very interested in getting 
the tool for themselves.


Best Regards,

 

John Holmblad

 

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John Meagher wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> oops! I created a Visio thread.  Sorry.
> It may in fact work, for those who invest in it, but for me it was never
> worth it.  I'm well aware that it has a lot of fans in the networking
> area, where I am, but I never understood why.
>
> I don't know of any open source alternative to Visio.
>
> Reasons--
> 1) Unlike anything you do in Office programs, last time I checked it
> doesn't work for the person you send it to unless you convert it or
> he/she has a viewer.  Even if he can view it, he can't edit and return
> it.  Powerpoint and Word work pretty well together.
>
> 2) I'm not a big believer in a complex symbols where a box with a few
> letters would suffice.  I like design drawings that have only
> significant things in them.  If you want nice icons, you can find them
> for Powerpoint in other peoples' drawings, get them from vendors, from
> google images, or in an emergency, manufacture them in Corel or Adobe.
> For sales-related things, I send them to a graphics person.
>
> 3) One big shortcoming of Powerpoint is the lack of good scaling
> features, but you can get around most of them with the grid. If you're
> good with it, it's very fast and the output is compact. It's possible to
> do very nice looking rack or network drawings with it.   
>
> Regards,
>
> John
> On Wed, 2008-06-18 at 19:47 -0400, John B. Holmblad wrote:
>   
>> John,
>>
>> re your comment
>>
>>     "Visio, trash. "
>>
>>
>> I am a perpetual Visio noobie and I have to say that I have found the
>> product very useful if sometimes frustrating to figure out without
>> reference to a user guide. What is the opensource alternative to
>> Visio?  Do you consider DIA to be such an alternative?
>>
>>
>> http://ostatic.com/165017-blog/dia-a-strong-open-source-answer-to-microsofts-visio
>>
>> Here by the way is one blog reader's commentary on Visio vs DIA:
>>
>>         > 'm sorry - anybody that has worked intensely with Visio will
>>         > agree that Dia is nowhere near Visio. 
>>         > 
>>         > Look even at this sentence from Dia's project website: "Dia
>>         > is roughly inspired by the commercial Windows program
>>         > 'Visio', though more geared towards informal diagrams for
>>         > casual use."
>>         > 
>>         > Dia is fugly, doesn't support Visio file formats etc.
>>         > 
>>         > This is really sad because we have been looking at open
>>         > source diagramming software to replace Visio in our company
>>         > because Visio is quite expensive if you have to license it
>>         > for everybody. But we just couldn't find a replacement.
>>         > 
>>         > People either suggest Dia - which just wouldn't cut the
>>         > mustard or some vector drawing program.
>>         > 
>>         > I think there is space for a descent diagramming open source
>>         > project. Preferable with lots of lgpl libraries so other
>>         > non-diagramming programs can have diagramming capabilities
>>         > added to them,
>>         > 
>>     
>
>
>
>
>
>   
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