DEALING WITH VISIO DRAWINGS

It's easy to include Visio drawings in your Word documents--in fact,

it's too easy. Technical writers and engineers are notorious for

inserting Visio drawings into documents that wind up in the cyber hands of Word users who don't have Visio installed on their machines.

Word users get frustrated when they accidentally double-click (instead of single-click) these objects because it takes forever for 

their systems to realize there's no copy of Visio available to open the

drawing.

If you (or someone in your company) uses Visio to create drawings that

eventually wind up in a Word document, here's a tip: Use Visio's File |

Save As option to save the drawing as a graphic image. Then insert the saved image--not the Visio drawing--into Word. Of course, if you need to change the drawing, you won't have the luxury of simply double-clicking the drawing to launch Visio; you'll have to launch the program separately.

If you use Visio to save the drawings as .gif or .jpg files, you don't

have to worry about users who don't have Visio (or who have it but

don't know what to do if it launches unexpectedly). Even if the Visio

drawing was originally designed to be printed on 36x48-inch plotter

paper, saving the drawing as a graphic image makes it easy to

manipulate once it's in your Word document.

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