Visio 2007 and the Web

Your organization might maintain a Web site on the Internet as well as an intranet site for internal communication. When you want to communicate processes, procedures, or other organizational information visually, you can save your Visio 2007 diagrams in a Web-compatible format to post to your organization’s internal or external Web site. Better yet, because more options are always better, as with Microsoft Office Visio 2003, Visio 2007 can save your information in a robust HTML format backed by XML.

When you save a Visio 2007 diagram as a Web page, you can take advantage of the following features:

• The Save As Web Page command on the File menu

• Multiple shape hyperlinks to other pages, drawings, and URLs

• A custom properties frame that displays shape data in a Web browser

• A documented application programming interface (API) that allows programmers to access the Save As Web Page functionality for batch conversion of files

In versions of Visio earlier than 2003, users experienced some problems when saving a document as HTML. For some drawing types, the quality of the image maps was less than ideal. Large drawings—measured in terms of the number of shapes—sometimes couldn’t be converted to HTML at all. To address these issues and to provide a more consistent interface for Microsoft Office users, the code behind the Save As Web Page command was entirely rewritten for Microsoft Office Visio 2002. Ever since Visio 2003, the program supports raster images natively with its GDI+ display technology, which means drawings simply look better when converted for display on the Web.

Most of the impressive Save As Web Page options in Visio 2007 are compatible with Internet Explorer 6 and later browsers. You can’t, however, count on every viewer getting the full effect. Those who use other browsers can usually still see the core of your page—the drawing itself.