The Pains I Have Gone Through Using Visio

There would be many people out there who really like Visio and consider it to be a very powerful tool to create diagrams, charts and UIs. No wonder it is a powerful tool and is quite a huge application, but I hate it. :-P

How did I come to hate it? Well, soon after I started working in it I started hating it. And my "hatred" is not baseless. Let me tell you how and why.

Well for one, maybe I am too used to making drawings in MS Word so that’s why I am not getting the hang of Visio. Visio doesn’t actually let me draw a shape on the canvas (like in Word) but wants me to first throw the shape there and then stretch it to the desired size. And God is it difficult to do that. (Could it be so that my mouse is faulty?)

Then if a file gets a bit big due to multiple drawings in the same file (let’s say up to 200 K) it becomes damn slow. Every action I perform after that takes at least 10 or more seconds to complete. (10 seconds might seem a very short time period but imagine spending a number of 10 seconds on several minute tasks)

And the worst thing is when we have to shift pages up and down, i.e. to reorder pages, in Visio terminology. Its fine if you have 10 or 20 pages in a file and you want to move the 20th page to the location of the 10th. But what if you have 80 pages and want to move the 80th page to the 10th? Or what if you want to move the pages numbered 70 to 80 to the location of 10 to 20. Believe me, its hell doing it in Visio. There is no way you can move a block of multiple pages to a different location at one time. You have to drag each and every page to its new location, and that is not a very pleasing task to do.

Maybe I wouldn’t have hated Visio so much if I could have gone home on time on the days I was working in Visio. Or maybe if Microsoft people make it better for ME to use, my hatred would lessen for sure. ;-)


PS: Ok I admit, I don't actually hate Visio. It's just that when things don't run smooth, this drives me mad (I still manage to keep my cool and stay calm). And so i come to think that I hate the thing responsible for the bumpy ride. ;-) Shear human nature, I presume. Or at least mine. ;-)