(whirring noise)
- Coming up, we take a look
at the latest updates to Microsoft Visio,
including how you can now view
and author Visio diagrams
from the browser within Office 365,
combine the power of Visio with Power BI
to overlay business insights on your Visio diagrams
to explore data within a real context,
and automatically create diagrams
from your data using our new data visualizer
in Visio with Excel.
(fast techno music)
I'm joined today by Mukul Kumar
from the Visio team, welcome.
- Thanks for having me on the show, Jeremy.
- It's been awhile since we've covered Visio
on Microsoft Mechanics, it's really one
of the most popular diagramming tools
on the planet, and over the past couple
of years it's been evolving fast.
- That's right, Jeremy.
Visio has a huge cross-industry, cross-discipline
appeal because you can visualize
almost anything with diagrams.
With Visio you can build any diagram,
from simple timelines to organization charts
to network topologies and complex process models,
and all of these are available for you
to get started quickly.
- And we're seeing Visio used for lots
of different use cases across industries
and really as a result, it's forcing your team
to also stretch its imagination in terms
of what we can make possible with Visio.
- Absolutely, and on the rich client side,
we've added even more sophisticated charts,
such as wire frames, making life easy
for the web designers.
- In fact, there are two areas
that I'm personally most excited about,
and those are the fact that it's
no longer really a niche,
expert business process manager tool.
In fact, anyone now can view and author diagrams.
We can now also transform these diagrams
into dynamic, data link dashboards.
- That's right, we've been following
a continuous innovation path
as part of Office 365, and the cloud.
And most of what I'll show you today
is made possible by that approach.
Here I am in Visio Online, and as you can see
I can view my Visio diagrams now.
- And it's really cool cause I don't actually need
to add any add-ins or browser extensions,
I'm viewing them directly here in this case
in Office 365, from an Edge browser
without having to install anything extra.
- It's all native, and in fact, we've made it
much easier to view Visio files from apps
within Office Online.
For example, I am in Office Outlook in the web,
and as you can see, I have the Visio diagrams over here.
In the past, if I clicked this, it would have asked me
to download the file and then associate it
with the right program to open it.
Let's have a look what happens now.
As you can see, it opens it right inside the browser.
You don't have to go out and do anything.
In fact, we have made it easier to view it
inside Microsoft Teams as well,
and very soon you'll be able to edit it
right within Microsoft Teams.
- So these are great new options for viewing.
But what are we doing
to help anyone create great Visio diagrams?
- With Visio Online you can now create
simple diagrams from the browser.
And because it's in the web, there's nothing
to install, and the application is always up to date.
Here in the Visio Online Editor, we give you
a lot of things to get started very quickly.
Up top we have the recent files you are working on,
if you scroll down, we give you a set of popular diagrams,
which you can choose and get started quickly.
You even have this magnifying button
which you press to see a preview
and if everything looks right,
you can go ahead and create it.
Let's go back up and search for a few diagrams.
Here I'm gonna search for a process flow,
and see what it brings up.
I scroll down and look at the search results,
and I think this one looks good to me,
and I'll go ahead and create it.
So it brings up a familiar Visio UI,
but as you can see, it's very clean
and simple, and beautiful.
Adding shapes is very easy
in the diagram, simple drag and drop.
You can connect the diagrams by just hovering
over them, it's very easy to delete
the elements as well.
All you have to do is simply delete
and it takes care of connecting the diagrams automatically.
Let's try and put a template on this
to make it look good.
And this looks good to me, so I'm gonna
go ahead and share it with you,
so that we can collaborate on this diagram.
- Okay, all right, so back on my PC
I'm gonna go ahead and refresh
the recently shared with me files here.
I should be able to see the VSC file
you just shared, there it is, Drawing15.
And the great thing is I can open it
straight from within the browser,
I don't have to install anything, there it is.
It looks just like it did when you shared it with me.
Here I see the theater booking process,
and one of the great things with this
is that because it's Visio Online,
I can actually embed that
into other experiences in Office 365.
So I'm gonna go ahead and copy the link here,
via the sharing dialogue.
Close that window down.
And now I've got a SharePoint team site
in this case that I'm working on
called Contoso Org, and I'm gonna edit that site.
And because Contoso Org and SharePoint online now
has this really easy kind of menu-based,
web part-based editing process, I just have
to open up the different web parts,
and you can see all the things you can add to it.
Right here in the middle is the file viewer,
and now what that's gonna do is ask me
for a link of that file that I just copied
over, that Visio chart.
We'll go ahead and add that there.
It says make sure that you've got permissions
for anybody whose gonna view this site
to view that Visio file, which we'll do later.
We'll go ahead and open, and now again
because we're in Visio Online,
they can render straight here with my team site,
and within SharePoint, I can even zoom in a little bit
if I wanna maybe accentuate parts of that chart,
just so you can see exactly what that chart
looks like, maybe it's my organizational chart
or the reporting structure of the team,
all of that right from within Visio Web part
inside part of my SharePoint Team site.
So we saw some great innovation here within SharePoint.
It's a lot simpler as a user interface,
and I can check the shapes, and even
as I take things away it keeps those connections in place.
And speaking of making these more accessible
for people and shareable across the organization,
are there other ways they can integrate Visio
within other Office 365 experiences?
- Yes, we absolutely can, and to show you
how powerful this integration feature is,
let me just show you a traditional Power BI dashboard.
Here we have an IOT facility's dashboard
used by this organization across multiple locations.
And this is rich data, full of bar charts,
but it doesn't tell you much.
It doesn't give you a real-world context,
why these two temperatures are so high for these rooms.
So let me show you what happens
if I add a Visio diagram to this.
So just by adding this Visio diagram,
now you have a real-world view of what's going on.
It seems like something's going on
in the northeast corner of this office space,
where all the rooms are a bit warmer.
So I can very clearly see that there are appliances
over here, which are probably making the room
run a bit hotter, so now, just by adding
a Visio diagram, the Power BI dashboard
becomes immensely useful.
- Right, and because it's Power BI
it's really easy to share the dashboard
with members of your team.
You can interact with it, you can embed it
within a SharePoint site or Microsoft Teams,
people can use it across their devices,
and also because it's Power BI,
you can connect really with any data source
and get extremely rich data connectivity.
How do I get all this working?
- Let me show you how.
So here we are in our Power BI dashboard,
we have rearranged the charts
to make space for the Visio visuals.
The first step is to edit the report
and then bring in the custom Visio visual,
from the Power BI marketplace.
So I'm gonna search for Visio.
And then simply add the visual.
Now the second step is to click that
so that we can get the place holder
for Visio, and I'm gonna map the data fields
and then connect the visual with the Visio diagram.
Just pasting the link over here.
And I'll say connect,
and it's gonna bring the facility's blueprint
of that office space.
So it does the field mapping automatically,
but here we see that we're a few missing,
so I'm gonna start with mapping them.
- Why don't you go ahead and go into it's own separate
tile then, just to show it a little larger?
- Yes, we can do that, that's a good idea.
Now the next step is to make sure
that it's showing that color indicator
for all the rooms, so I'm gonna start with deviation.
I'm gonna change the ranges, so I want zero
to one to be shown as let's say blue.
So these rooms are cooler.
And then the slightly warmer ones
I'll do one to two, and I'll assign,
let's say yellow.
And then I'll do the hotter ones for two to four.
And I'll make them red.
So this is how you get to that nice visual,
which is telling you hey these rooms are cooler
and these rooms are hotter.
- And now if you go back to the dashboard
you can see how it's hooked up
to the rest of the data in your Power BI dashboard.
- That's right.
- Very cool, so switching gears though
on the other hand you can also build Visio diagrams
directly by using data in Excel, right?
- That's right, for Visio on the desktop
one of the most powerful capabilities
that we've added is a feature called data visualizer.
And that allows you to automatically create diagrams
from the data you already have,
and it's all dynamically synced.
And here we have on our Visio desktop app,
and we start with choosing a template,
so I'm gonna start with creating a diagram
using one of the pre-existing templates
we give you for data visualizer.
Those templates are indicated by this tiny
little Excel icon, so I'm gonna start
by clicking that, and then this wizard
will run me through a few steps
where I can choose my Excel data source.
So I'm gonna say browse, and I'm gonna go
to my process data,
and right now it's grabbing those tables
so it grabbed the process map data,
and I'm gonna say next, make sure everything looks good.
And then finish the diagram.
And then it's gonna be creating the diagram
right from the Excel data.
So what you see here is automatically generated
from your Excel data source.
- And if you're wondering where to get those template files,
you can actually download those as part
of the create new templates that are here.
And here you can see the downloaded template
or download the Excel template,
and if you click on that you'll see exactly
what that Excel file looks like.
So you can start creating these for yourself today.
So really a fantastic overview, all the updates
in Visio, Visio Online, and also the integration
that we saw in Power BI and Excel,
but what else has the team been working on?
- So one of the things we are really excited about
is integrating Visio with mixed-reality scenarios.
- And one of the things as a gadget guy
I was really excited to see in the September timeframe
was this integration and this partnership
with Finger Food Studio, and their work
that they're doing to actually integrate mixed reality
in Windows with Visio, so here we're actually
looking at a factory floor effectively
and the IOT sensor data, and they're coupling
that together with Visio live data,
so you can actually do things like troubleshooting
maybe valves, or in this case pipe sensors,
they make alerts and you can see
what's going on there using the power of MR plus Visio.
- Yes, and that's just the tip of the iceberg,
and of course, we are always exploring additional use cases,
so please keep giving us your feedback.
- Okay, so how can people then get started
with what you've show us today.
- So if you are on Office 365, you can start viewing
with your files today.
To get started using Visio, you can
access our trial at the link shown.
- And of course, to see all the latest tech
in action, subscribe to our channel
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That's all the time we have for this show.
Thanks for watching.
(techno music)