Re: Visio (was: Auto-building docs manual)

Some thoughts on documentation.

You can export Visio docs to images for documentation.

Check out draw.io for an alternate to Visio.
http://draw.io

Check out EC Software Help and Manual for creating help docs
https://www.helpandmanual.com/

Or create a site with Confluence or something else the customer can maintain.

Regards,
Richard Schoen
Director of Document Management
e. richard.schoen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
p. 952.486.6802
w. helpsystems.com

-----Original Message-----
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message: 1
date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 16:13:22 -0500
from: John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx>
subject: [PCTECH] Visio (was: Auto-building docs manual)

[Migrated from the RPG list]

On Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 12:46 PM, Craig Richards <craig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

If I'm honest I would say the most useful documentation I've found to
be my own visio diagrams with annotations.
Well, I say Visio, but my version is Visio 4 - way before microsoft
got involved and sadly I just can't get that to run in Windows 10.
I can get it to run on my mac in my old copy of VMware Fusion but I
can never get the virtual printing to work properly.
So these days, with the extortionate price that microsoft charge for
visio it's googledocs drawings for me!

Have you given Dia a try? It is a free and open-source alternative to Visio:

https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Dia/

It's pretty old now, but a lot newer than Visio 4. Then again, it's entirely possible that newer versions of Visio and Visio-inspired software may be less appealing to you, because of user interface changes or whatever.

Still, there are quite many alternatives out there today. My personal favorite diagram software (focused on the mathematical notion of graphs composed of vertices and edges) is yEd.

But there are also Lucidchart, Gliffy, Creately, and a host of others.
If you Google "best software for drawing flowcharts" you'll get a bar at the top with many, many viable alternatives. I'm confident something there will strike your fancy. You may well be surprised by just how awesome some of the modern software is. For my purposes, Lucidchart and yEd were revolutionary. Paradigm-changing. Like suddenly being able to fly.

John Y.