Visio and Word

It's easy to bring in your Visio content into Word - depending upon what you want to import, you can choose a procedure that suits you best. While I'm using Word for these examples, the same techniques can be used to insert Visio content in Excel, Publisher or PowerPoint as well.

The PowerPoint and Visio page might be helpful too, especially If you are looking for more detailed information on using Visio and PowerPoint together - for instance you might want to animate Visio content within PowerPoint.

Basically, you can import two types of Visio content - shapes and drawings.

Shapes are the individual building blocks that comprise finished Visio drawings - in Visio parlance, shapes are collectively stored in libraries called Stencils. Visio ships with an impressive collection of stencils suitable for block diagrams, building plans, databases, engineering (electric, mechanical and process) models, flowcharts, forms and charts, maps, visual networks, organization charts, project schedules, software structures and web diagrams.

The stencils that you can view within your Visio interface (see File | Shapes) are actually all individual stencil files that are recognizable with the VSS extension. Visio is completely extensible and any other third-party stencil that you place within the designated stencil folder (usually Program Files\Microsoft Office\Visio11\1033 for Visio 2003 - for other versions, do a search on your system for *.vss) shows up within Visio itself.

There are many ways you can insert Visio content into Word. Easiest of them all is to copy from Visio and paste into Word. Although this is not suitable for all purposes, it certainly is the easiest way. Double-clicking the drawing in Word will automatically launch Visio and you can also carry out edits as required within Visio itself and all changes are visible within Word as well. However, this can cause problems if the Word file is moved to another system that has no Visio installed.

To counter that, you can choose Paste Special in Word rather than Paste and choose either Paste (Windows Metafile) or Picture (Enhanced Metafile) - this pastes a scalable drawing into Word that has no link with its original content.

Sometimes, it is a better idea to export the drawing from Visio to a graphic format that Word can understand and then bring it into Word using the Insert | Picture route.

1. Open or create a Visio diagram. Choose File | Save As...
   
   
2. The resultant 'Save As' dialog box allows you to save the diagram to several graphic formats - both vector and raster. In all you can save to 28 formats - we'll choose WMF or EMF since they are the best formats to transport graphic content between Microsoft applications.
   
   
3. In Word, choose Insert | Picture | From File... and navigate to and choose the WMF/EMF file.

Off Topic: If you need to send your Visio content to a high-end printer or page layout program, you could have chosen the AI/EPS file type in the File | Save As... in Visio 2002 or earlier. Unfortunately, this ability is no longer available in Visio 2003.

You can export to the SVG format which Adobe Illustrator opens natively.

To insert Visio shapes into Word, you don't even need to open Visio. You can open VSS - Visio Stencil files even without invoking Visio. VSS files are typically stored in a designated folder. (see above - Shapes, Stencils and Drawings)

Double click any VSS file in Windows Explorer to open it in a separate compact window if Visio is not already open. Click any shape and drag it into an open Word document window. That's all you need to do! This trick works with PowerPoint too.