Can Visio do large drawings?

[XP]

Using Office 2003 on Win XP;

Is it possible to set up Visio to have an unlimited (or very large - like
60") canvas? If so, how?

If not, here is what I am looking for: the ability to make very large charts
that can be exported as an image, like a jpg or PDF (although I don't think
you can make that large a PDF file either) or other graphical format that
most users would be able to open (jpg, tif, etc). This would be used only for
on-computer viewing (i.e. not printed) over the internet.

Unfortunately, the budget is limited to under a couple hundred dollars. The
chart is simple blocks connected by lines, but must be able to handle
multiple fonts, text, colors, hyperlinks. Any ideas what to use or where I
can start looking?

Problem is, if you just google, there are about a billion packages out there
that range from free to several thousand $ = but, which are good?

Thanks much in advance for your assistance.

 

[Paul Herber]

Using Office 2003 on Win XP;

Is it possible to set up Visio to have an unlimited (or very large - like
60") canvas? If so, how?

If not, here is what I am looking for: the ability to make very large charts
that can be exported as an image, like a jpg or PDF (although I don't think
you can make that large a PDF file either) or other graphical format that
most users would be able to open (jpg, tif, etc). This would be used only for
on-computer viewing (i.e. not printed) over the internet.

Unfortunately, the budget is limited to under a couple hundred dollars. The
chart is simple blocks connected by lines, but must be able to handle
multiple fonts, text, colors, hyperlinks. Any ideas what to use or where I
can start looking?

Problem is, if you just google, there are about a billion packages out there
that range from free to several thousand $ = but, which are good?

Thanks much in advance for your assistance.

Just set the drawing scale
menu File -> Page Setup
Drawing Scale tab
setting the Mechanical Engineering 1/8th scale gives you a page 60"
or so wide.

 

[G-Money]

Page scaling is probably the answer if exporting to an image or PDF is
a problem for large sizes. If it is not actually a problem, you can
set a page size at:

File->Page Setup->Page Size->Custom Size

Saving as an image (e.g., jpeg) did not cause any problems for me.
The save as dialog also prompts you to change the image resolution and
scaling if you want.

PDF can be done with a custom page, but it takes more work. First,
you generally need to "print to PDF" rather than "save as PDF."
Second, I have not seen a freebie PDF print driver for Visio that
works perfectly. I have only had luck with the PDF print driver from
the full version of Adobe Acrobat. In Visio, go to:

File->Print

Select the Adobe PDF printer.

Select the "Properties" button. Go to the "Adobe PDF Settings" tab.
Select the "Add" button next to the "Adobe PDF Page Size" field. Type
in a new name for your PDF custom page size and the dimensions of the
custom page. You might need to fiddle with the placement of
dimensions and page orientation to get it to match the Visio drawing.
Select OK several times to go back to the Visio Print dialog. You may
need to close and reopen the Visio Print dialog to get it to see the
changes made in the PDF dialogs. Then select the OK button in the
Visio Print dialog to print to PDF using the custom PDF page size.

Hope that helps.
Garrett

 

[XP]

Thanks Paul, but it's not scale I need, but 60" of drawing canvas. Do I need
some sort of CAD program for that?

 

[David Parker]

60" of drawing canvas is no problem ... just use Page Setup to define the
size you want