visio & database

[gilad]

i am examine visio 2003 to my comany and i have few questions:
does visio 2003 have a option to see process in a hierarchic way (i mean, for eample, if i want to know the process that stand behind a function i thr "home" process, is there a possibility to dobule click of the function and see the process ?) ?
is visio 2003 is a tool that is base on a data base ? if the answer is yes, so what is the type data base ?
what kind of data can i had to the symbols ?
if there is a data that i want to had to the symbol that is not a part of the original field that existing fields of the symbols. is
there a way to had fields ?
i would like to know what is the abilily of visio to analyze the data ?
what is the procedure of analyzing the data ?
what kind of report can i get ? is there any "built" reports that i can ger from the data ?
i know that there is a lot of questions , but i would be more than happy to get answer....
good weekend
gilad

 

[Mark Nelson [MS]]

Hi Gilad,

The best way to think about Visio is first as a drawing tool and second as a
data tool. That means that you will be diagramming your process with shapes
and then associating those shapes to data. Visio has no built-in analysis
capabilities.

You can enter data into the shapes in the drawing or you can connect the
shapes to an external database. Within Visio, the information is not stored
in a database structure. Any piece of data can be displayed as text in the
drawing using text fields. You can add your own fields to any shape or
collection of shapes.

While there are no automatic drill-down capabilities, you can create
multiple pages in your document. You can add double-click actions to any
shape to jump to a different page. This allows you to put sub-processes on
other pages. Hyperlinks are also supported.

Visio does have a reporting tool that will generate reports for the data in
the drawing. The reports have many filter and formatting options and can
output to Visio, Excel, HTML or XML.

To summarize, Visio is a very capable tool and many customers use it for
just what you describe (a data-backed drawing). There is some setup work on
your part to define the data fields in the shapes, enter the information and
connect to a database. Visio provides the user interface to do these tasks,
though some customers choose to write their own automation code instead.

--
Mark Nelson
Microsoft Corporation

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

i am examine visio 2003 to my comany and i have few questions:
does visio 2003 have a option to see process in a hierarchic way (i mean,

for eample, if i want to know the process that stand behind a function i thr
"home" process, is there a possibility to dobule click of the function and
see the process ?) ?

is visio 2003 is a tool that is base on a data base ? if the answer is

yes, so what is the type data base ?

what kind of data can i had to the symbols ?
if there is a data that i want to had to the symbol that is not a part of

the original field that existing fields of the symbols. is