Craig, Andy, and Others:

The apparent GUI standard brought about by Windows works different than the Solaris GUI on a Sun workstation which in turn works different from the GUI on a Apple MAC. That said it is not unexpected that CAD Program #1 works different from CAD Program #2 which in turn works different from CAD Program #3, even if they are all on the same platform.

These differences don't bother me at all. I have learned to look at software tools, listen to others comments and recommendations, and read reviews of the tools and then get a pretty good idea of what is going to be a good tool to put into the tool chest. At the same time I fully expect that there will be a learning curve to become proficient at any given tool. That is just part of the process.

Now getting back to Visio. If you look at the program closely you will find that all common ordinary program functions such as file operations, object selection, moving, copying, dragging etc., all are implemented just as you would expect for a Windows program. You will experience differences where the program veers off the common functions and shows the side of its face with its proprietary features and unique operating procedures.

But....I can say the SAME exact thing about EXCEL, WORD, AUTOCAD, the CYGNAL IDE, the KEIL uVision 2 IDE, INTERNET EXPLORER, REGEDIT, EUDORA email, NOTEPAD, WINZIP, etc etc etc.

That said...I still recommend Visio over other tools for diagrams with boxes/symbols connected by lines. I have tried other programs over the years but none match Visio. And there is another significant advantage as well which I have not even mentioned up till now. I think it may well be worth discussing it here.

----so here goes----
In my work most diagrams I make with Visio are not standalone documents. Of course each diagram is a file saved to disk and there is a nice thing with that too. Viseo files are surprisingly small compared to the 100's of KBytes you see for file sizes in most tools these days. But most times I am doing diagrams there are actually the figures in other documents. By virtue of industry commonality is most often necessary to do design documentation these days in Microsoft WORD. It is not uncommon for me to have software description documents for embedded medical devices that I have worked on that go beyond 350 pages and contain more than 75 maybe even up to 100 charts of the Visio type. I have to say flatly that the combination of using WORD and its OLE capabilities works the better with Visio files than any other type of CAD files that I have worked with. (Note for large documents I would never recommend using OLE of the type that links to an external file. WORD still has nasty bugs in it when you have either large numbers of OLE file links OR when you move the main document and its brood of linked files into different directory structures than under which the document was originally written). When make these large documents I use the OLE objects of the type where the complete object is imbedded into the main WORD document. Flatly I can tell you that a 22 megabyte WORD document with 85 to 100 embedded VISIO graphic images will actually work. WORD will maybe only crash 4 or 5 times during the document creation process. Try the same size of project with embedded CorelDraw objects, or AutoCad objects, or ORCAD objects or even MS PAINT objects and WORD will crash more often than you can recover from backup copies of the document.

Michael Karas