Visio 2003

[Venkatesh]

I have played around with Visio 2003. It seems like it has its niche ... somewhere.

I cannot think of a way a FIRST team would use Visio. Do any of you out there use it? If so, how (and why)?

[KenWittlief]

Visio is the PERFECT SW tool for making button designs.

you can make drawings exactly to scale with it - each thing you place can remain a separate item, or you can group them together - and each item can be pulled to the forground, or pushed to the back - for example, if you are making buttons that are 2.5" in diameter, you can have a grey circle on the image that stays on top, so you can see how the design fits, then delete it before you print the pages.

and if you pull in bmp or jpeg files to add to your button designs, the image quality is excellent - it doesnt degrade the image, even if you pull a large one in and make it smaller to fit.

other things its good for is doing flow charts for your SW

there is an office space set of symbols, you can lay out your teams workspace

and its great for doing project schedule.

Visio is an excellent SW package for drawing just about anything- even concepts of your robot - rough sketches

BTW - just so you know - the version they gave us this year, you need XP or win2000 to install it, but you can use it on your computer as a trial version - it will run something like 50 times before you would have to register it to keep it running.