What is Visio?
Visio is a Microsoft product, and is considered an extension of Microsoft Office. It is a drawing tool that makes it easy to assemble many typical business drawings by dragging and dropping shapes off of stencils. Different stencils focus on specific drawing applications (e.g. block diagrams, floor plans, org charts), and many of these stencils revolve around different engineering specialties (e.g. electrical, mechanical, process). Visio has what is called ‘smart shapes’, which can store data and which connect to one another in programmable ways. Every Visio shape is backed by a shapesheet – a spreadsheet that tells the shape how to behave based on contained data. This makes Visio a very powerful tool when enhanced with the knowledge modeling capabilities provided by the Apprentice. Many deployed Apprentice applications do not use Visio, but most Apprentice modeling tools use Visio as part of the knowledge capture environment.
