Microsoft Office Visio 2003 Inside Out (Inside Out (Microsoft))

If you’re the only one who needs to see a space plan, you can work with it in Visio, where you’ll have access to the custom properties for each of the shapes. However, if you want to share the space plan—perhaps a manager needs to know where her reports are sitting, or the local computer expert needs to update virus protection software in certain offices—you have several options:

• You can save the space plan in a Web-compatible format, as Figure 26-26 shows. When you publish the space plan on your intranet or Internet site, others can interact with the drawing and use it to locate people. To export a space plan for use on the Web, choose File, Save As Web Page. For details, see Chapter 5, “Using Visio Diagrams on the Web.”

  Figure 26-26: When you save a space plan as HTML and use Vector Markup Language (VML) format, you can interact with the drawing using Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 or later.

• You can save your plan in a static graphic format that can be added to an existing Web page, such as GIF or JPEG. To do this, choose File, Save As, and then choose the format you want in the Save As Type list. For details, see “Exporting Shapes and Diagrams,” page 217.

• You can also publish your Visio drawing in a shared workspace where others can look at it with the Visio viewer available at http://www.microsoft.com/visio.

In addition, facilities management software developers can use Visio as their graphic engine for Web deployment. Space plans and the data that goes with them can be saved in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format and integrated into other software programs. Exactly how to do this is beyond the scope of this book. However, Microsoft provides developer documentation for Visio that includes information about programming and XML. For details, search http://msdn.microsoft.com/visio for information about a Visio XML reference, which was not yet available at the time this book was being written.