Everyone who knows me online or is used to seeing me hanging out on several IRC channels or posting messages in my Twitter/Identi.ca accounts may have noticed my absense these last few weeks. Work, family and school have really kept me on my toes and my “social” life had to take the back seat.
I want to believe that I have done a decent job at juggling all the tasks I have been assigned, even if it means to do my school assignments while I eat lunch, as I did today! The assignment for my database design class consisted in turning some user requirements of a pretend dog trainning business into a real entity relational diagram. Due to some factors which are not relevant right now, I have been forced to use Microsoft Access and Visio for this class and I had to install Windows XP on my old laptop. The tools are very shiny and well integrated, as they try to be smart enough to predict what you’re trying to do. I’m sure that under different circunstances I could appreciate that whole “AI” process taking place, but today… it cost me the 1 hour I had set aside to turn the rough draft I created during lunch into the final product which needs to be handed in tomorrow.
Microsoft Visio is too smart for its own good! In an attempt to speed up how you lay out objects on the canvas, it tries to (literally) connect the dots for your diagram, not letting me do things my way! The simple task of drawing a straight line connecting two entities OR even drawing a multivalue attribute (diagramatically represented by 2 nested ovals offset by a few pixels) took me several minutes, as the objects would automatically morph themselves once it got too close to another one! I found myself “hacking” the widgets in order to draw what I really needed!
My one hour allocated for this assignment went by and my wife found me cursing at the laptop and all the “smart tools” I have installed. I decided that I had enough for today and would deal with this tomorrow and even considered handing in the assignment late and taking the 5-points per day penalty.
Two minutes later I was at my desk and, stubborn as I am, decided to take a different approach. I knew that some time before I started school I had installed Dia so to test an open source diagramming tool. To make a long story short, shortly after starting the program and choosing the ER sheet option, I was up and running at full speed! “But how are you going to present it to your instructor in this format,” asked my wife. A little bit of poking around showed me that not only Dia exports diagrams to SVGs but it also exports to Microsoft Visio format!
Needless to say, all my ER diagrams will be designed using Dia from now on… and Microsft Visio? it will most likely spend the rest of its days as the means of opening my Dia files and printing them for my school assignments!
I have had some bad experience with exporting Dia schema’s to Visio. Specifically with keeping the correct scale of my diagrams. I hope yiu fared better at that point.
Your experience however will cause me to look again at the Dia Visio interface, because I like Dia much better than Visio for my diagramming efforts.
Thnx for your post.
hmm… kay?
maybe you are just too dumb to use visio.
Reply: It’s a possibility. I’m sure that Visio can do what I needed but the point is that it was too complicated and it took me less time to do it with Dia. Now, why the gratuitious nasty remark? Are you one of the Visio developers?
Please try OmniGraffle next time you’re on OS X. Humm.. perhaps you shouldn’t as you think Dia is nice. But if you dare have a look.. here’s the url:
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/OmniGraffle/
Maybe there’s some trial version, or beta for the next version that is free for download, otherwise you can probably find it on The Pirate Bay. Open Source diagram tools suddenly seem to have a really insanely long way to go. :/
I know what you mean about Visio… it can be a bit of a pain. I do not recall it trying to morph things as you moved them around, but I certainly had my share of problems and share your frustrations.
When needing to get things done, I would do one of two options… the first is to try to work through the Visio issues and the other is to use the online diagramming tool Gliffy http://www.gliffy.com/
I think I’ve installed Dia before but did not get a good first impression for whatever reason… you’ve motivated me to give it another try
I’ve generally used Kivio, the KDE diagram program, which can also use Dia’s icon sets etc.
I would turn it in (on CD? email?) in both the requested format of Visio, and the Dia format or whatever the default open format option is, maybe the SVG. Let your professor know that you dislike being forced to use closed, non-Free software for this project (that is, if you care about licensing)
Same thing happened to me. Me and a guy on Vista started a project on Visio. In the end, he ended up with Ubuntu on his laptop and we both finished it in Dia.
Actually you can easily reconfigure Snap/Glue options in Visio or show Snap/Glue panel and switch on/off it as you need.
There was some counter-intuitive change in snapping/connecting in Visio 2k7, but it’s configurable too.
To be honest for me it would be easier to use Inkscape (which I dislike) then Dia.
It seems to be impossible to create stencils for Kivio 1.6 (psn told it will be available in 2.0, but there is no 2.0 yet, is it?)
Some people claim that OO.Draw is good for simple diagramming. I believe it depends…
Visio 2000 is way better than Microsoft Visio 2007. It would have behaved.
Microsoft Office 2007 is worse than Office 2000. This is why it is getting to be a easy target. I use Openoffice and Office 2000 interchangeably.
Visio 2000 and Dia interchangeably. Now if we can get OpenProject 2003……