Home > Consumer Reviews > Microsoft Visio Professional 2002 Upgrade from 5.0 or Later

The good - features that I am excited about: (1) Professional and Technical versions are combined. You get IT and facilities diagrams and wizards in the same package. (2) You can create diagrams that can export properties to XML. The possibilities are endless: exchange product data with suppliers and customers based on your own product's attributes, export bill of materials to ERP systems, manage assets and get control of total cost of ownership and export process model data to other tools. (3) You can directly scan images or download photos from digital cameras into Visio and use the new photo editing tools to enhance or modify the images to suit your needs. (4) Analyze your web site and develop a complete report of all links. A powerful feature is spotting broken links, making this a good tool for your quality assurance group.

The bad - stuff I do not like: the web link feature has some possible "gotchas". Specifically, When you type a hyperlink in a Microsoft Office XP application (of which this version is a part), it has been reported that the application will alter what you've typed, without notifying you or giving you an opportunity to undo the "correction." Not good.

The ugly - things about this product that scare me: As part of the XP family of products, Visio 2002, like the XP operating system and Office family, will require activation over the Internet once it's been installed. You can bring it up and use it 5 times before activation, but after that it will not work. This is Microsoft's defense against piracy, and at first glance is a sensible scheme. However, if you reinstall it you have to call Microsoft and get instructions. This is NOT a sensible scheme for a number of reasons. First, I travel, and sometimes outside of the country. Calling Redmond is not viable if my system crashes and I need to reload applications. Second, if I want to upgrade my hard drive I cannot simply reinstall this application (or any of the "XP" family applications or operating systems) because when I first activated it there is an entry made in some database somewhere that says this application is already installed and cannot be activated again. The solution is to call and have some unknown drone bypass big brother. What is this going to cause me in lost productivity?

If you need the "good" and can live with the "bad" and "ugly" then this is a worthwhile upgrade. Think long and hard about the "ugly" part, though, because it has ramifications that can be much more serious than I've described. On the other hand, perhaps a wave of good sense will descend upon Redmond and they come up with a more workable solution that shows they care about customers and understand stuff like total cost of ownership and the value of productivity.

For the record, I am not ruining a perfectly good version of Visio by installing this version over it. My productivity and sanity is worth more to me than the new features. You have my opinion and must decide for yourself.

But it doesn't go far enough. Visio is one of those really cool, fun, products that you start to use and then you say "ok, but where do I go from here?"

One quite bizarre example is the database module for ER diagramming: It will REVERSE engineer a database beautifully, but... why would I want to do that if I can't use the diagram for anything but documentation purposes? So you think to yourself, "well, ok, I have ERwin, so I'll just export it to that...", but then you find out that Visio can IMPORT an ERwin model, but not export one??? What a strange omission! If Visio could export an ERwin model, I could buy ONE seat of a $4000 forward engineering database tool, and innumerable seats of $400 Visio! Then I could export to ERwin, forward engineer, and have my whole team using a very approachable, inexpensive tool to boot! I don't know, maybe even Microsoft if afraid of the mighty, abusive, litigous Computer Associates! This is kind of like the Dead Sea of software products: It will take you in, but you'll never get out!

In the software portion, it also is pretty much a dead end for forward engineering, although very cool and complete for documentation purposes, but Microsoft is also very tight with Rational and doesn't want to upset that apple cart either. One thing I was disappointed about was that nothing showed up as far as Java, C#, or .NET data types. I thought this was a little weird, as that's kind of the reason I upgraded. I didn't install it on my .NET server though, so maybe if you do that it picks that up, but to leave out Java is a little bit of an omission, I think.

On the plus side, the interface is beautiful, it does everything but the kitchen sink documentation wise, the shapes and the way they interact is downright magical, and the thing below about the software registration is really overblown: The only thing they make you provide is the country you reside in. In fact, it says right on the CD case "Don't lose this number! You must use it EVERY TIME you install this software." Microsoft is realistic: they know that you will most likely put it on at least two of your computers, and they're not in panic mode.

Bottom line: The best "single source" documentation tool ever devised is Visio 2002.

I have read some of the reviews about visio and find that they are unfair or written by people who are just don't see the big picture. First of I have been using Visio since version 1.0, way before Microsoft bought them. I have all the Adobe products as well. There are things you can not do in Adobe. There are things you can not with Visio. However I use both programs and find that I can design quicker and more efficently using the two opened at the same time. You can set something up with Visio including text then copy it to Adobe then scale the object and the text scales with it. You can make custom shapes that you can't make with Adobe. One more thing it also works well with Auto Cad. Like any tool you need to know how to use it!

The new XP Product Activation that is in Windows XP, Office XP, and this Visio do not require you to phone Microsoft when you "upgrade your hard drive" as is indicated below. It would take a monstrous upgrade of many components to require another phone call - please consider that "ugly" listed below is not nearly as ugly as described.

Upon using this software it has froze my Windows98 OS multiple times. Walls do not auto-align and in one month's worth of use it has caused 6 fatal errors.

Granted it's easy to use but for the price lacks the power of other layout software. I only use it because it is a common tool and file layout within my industry.