Saturday, October 20, 2012

The new Visio start experience

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

The new Visio start experience is all about helping you quickly and easily find the template you need to begin your diagramming experience. You'll see that we've updated all our template icons to be simpler and easier to quickly scan.   We've also color coded them, so that, for example, all the flowchart related templates are green. Additionally, new search functionality will make it easy to find exactly what you're looking for to get started creating your diagram.

Ultimately, we think these improvements will make it a lot faster to go from booting Visio to drawing your diagram. 

Visio 2013 start experience

If you don't yet have the Visio Preview, you can find instructions for getting it here so that you can try the changes out for yourself.

One of the first things you'll notice in the new start experience is that templates are presented in a single flat list that lets you see the breadth of content the new Visio has to offer. We also put our most popular templates first, so that they are easier to access. 

Visio 2013 start screen

All of the new Visio's template icons have been redesigned to be simpler and easier to scan, as well as color coded by template type. For example, all of your business and scheduling templates are blue, flowcharts are green, network, software and database are orange, etc. We found this made it even faster for folks to quickly scan the list of templates and find the one they're looking for.

The new Visio has enabled its entire template library to be searchable via the search bar on the start experience. Simply type in the template you're looking for or click one of the "Suggested searches" links to get started. And, if you liked our old template categories, you'll notice we've pre-populated them as the suggested searches, so they're only a click away. 

Visio start search

For example, searching for "uml" returns all the Visio templates related to UML diagram notation.

Visio start search results

Over time, based on usage data from the new Visio, we plan to modify our start experience's template order to reflect changes in template usage. For example, if we learn that most folks really enjoy our new Timeline or BPMN templates, we may move them up higher in the Featured tab view so that the start experience is optimized to be as fast as possible for the largest number of people possible.

Of course, if you do have a few favorite templates that you don't want us moving around, we also have an easy way to pin things to the top of the list. To do so, simply hover over the template you want to pin, and click the pin icon. You'll see the template move to the top of your templates list and it will stay there, until you tell us otherwise. 

Visio start template pin

To unpin the template, simply hover over the template and click the pin icon again. The next time you launch Visio, the template will be back in its original un-pinned location. 

Visio start template unpin

When you've found a template you'd like to use, you can single-click it to display the Enhanced Template Preview, which will provide you with a larger preview image of the template icon, a description of the template, and allow you to select your template unit type (US/Metric).

If you prefer to jump right into the template, simply double-click the template icon from the Start screen. This will use the units you selected last time you opened this template.

Visio start enhanced template preview

Above the template icons, you'll notice two different tabs: "Featured" and "Categories". If you do prefer the hierarchical view of our templates from Visio 2010, it's still available. Simply click on the "Categories" tab above the template icons and your view will change to display templates organized by type. You'll still get all of the modern and color coded template icons too.

However, by default your view is set to the Featured tab, where you will see the flat list of templates ordered by popularity and your own usage over time. 

Visio start categories tab view

The Categories tab is also where you'll find "New from existing..." and any templates that were installed with an add-on. Having a dedicated area for this content will make it easier and faster for users to find and we're really excited to provide our more advanced users this functionality.

Finally, you can set the Categories tab to be your default view using group policy:

Policy Name: L_DefaultBuiltInTab

Registry Path + Value:[ HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Visio\Application] - "OfficeStartDefaultTab"

0 = Featured tab

2 = Categories tab

If you have custom personal templates you can view them in the new Start experience in a separate tab. Just go to Options and under Save add the path of your templates folder where it says "Default personal templates location". 

Visio start custom personal templates dialog

With the new Visio's start experience, we hope it's easier than ever for you to both find the template you're looking for, and discover new templates you may have never knew Visio offered. We encourage you to explore- look through all the templates we provide and try opening a few you've never seen before.   You'd be amazed at wide array of content we've got in here!

To learn more about the Start experience across all of your Office apps, stay tuned for an upcoming post on the Office Next blog.


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