How do I represent several MS Visio diagrams in MS Word?

Question

I have about twenty MS Visio diagrams that I would like to represent in an MS Word document for delivery to users who do not have Visio. This presents two problems:

1. It is really boring to keep the MS Word document up-to-date with changes to the Visio documents
2. The resulting file is really big.

Does anyone have any suggestions for solving either of the above please?

Thanks,

Dave.

Answer 1

You can view visio diagrams via Internet Explorer. Viewer download is necessary. If the customer would be able to get this viewer you could deliver them the raw Visio files and they'd be all set. This way you wouldn't have the problem of having to repeat yourself.

Visio Viewer

Answer 2

I'm removing my silly answer about using Makefiles. Word has a feature that will do this for you reasonably well.

Do this when you insert your diagrams into word (I assume you're pasting in pdfs or something, and not the raw visio) 1. Insert -> Picture -> From File 2. Choose the picture to insert 3. DON't just click the Insert button, click the dropdown and choose "Insert and Link"

Now, you can freely edit your diagrams. When it comes time to send out that word document again, open it up and do this: 1. Edit -> Links 2. Select all the images in the list of links 3. Click "Update Now"

Answer 3

I usually end up saving the diagrams as Enhanced Metafile (.emf)_ and then embedding the resulting image. This solves the size problem for most line drawings since metafiles are much more amenable to scaling and printing than raster formats. The downside is that you have to keep them in sync. I'd imagine that there is some method of automating this but I haven't found one if you are tied to using Word as your document format.

As a programmer, I really like editing in something like DocBook. The image source can be an HTTP endpoint so image translation is pretty easy to automate with PHP or [insert your favorite web platform here]. Since the rendering is delayed until you publish as a PDF, you don't have to worry about things getting "out of sync". The downside is that I haven't found a good way to extract individual diagrams from a Visio file in a way that is conducive to this :(

Maybe we will be really lucky and someone will write a nice whiz-bang editor or utility that generates SVG files from Visio or EMFs.