Looking around for a project for work... does anyone know of a good software package that you can use to develop expandable flowcharts? Like it will have the basic, overall flow, but if you want to zoom in to see more details it will allow you to expand a certain section and look at it closer (and maybe see more, smaller flow charts, within the detail area that were hidden when you were looking at the overall, high level view...


thanks

3/31/2008 2:33:51 PM

Microsoft Project?

3/31/2008 2:35:42 PM

does it have the expandable type thing?

3/31/2008 2:38:20 PM

There's nothing that does this automatically.

Visio is what you want. You can build the high level chart on one page, and put links in it to other pages with in-depth sections for each high level section.

3/31/2008 6:32:52 PM

^

3/31/2008 6:57:50 PM

nothing at all?

4/1/2008 11:19:12 AM

+1 Visio

4/1/2008 12:11:02 PM

idk if this will do it, but i like Dia for linux.

http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/

4/1/2008 12:49:43 PM

If you have a Mac, try OmniGraffle

4/1/2008 2:25:42 PM

^ and ^^ thanks... but has to be Windows based

4/1/2008 2:38:21 PM

flowcharts=visio

4/1/2008 2:40:26 PM

Visio or

Excel + flowbreeze

4/1/2008 3:59:36 PM

^which is like a mutant child of Visio

4/1/2008 4:52:05 PM

what I am wanting is like that ^^ but have it where when you click or hover over 'describe the problem' for example, the initial flowchart kind of fades to the background and a new, detailed flow chart containing all the mini processes that go into 'desribe the problem' appears... so not so much on a separate link but more like an active, 'windowed' type thing..

4/1/2008 5:32:55 PM

doesn't exist.

You can make that with a combination of Visio and Powerpoint, but there's no out of the box software to do it.

4/1/2008 5:36:35 PM

damn


lets invent this shit

4/1/2008 5:48:30 PM

This would be great for IT/Networking...

Large overview diagram, click on the "SanFran" and you see a little bit deeper diagram of just that site, with possibly even deeper diagrams within.

That would freakin rock my socks off.

4/5/2008 1:34:53 PM

yeah.. I need some shit like this for my network diagram I have to put together...

4/5/2008 1:51:13 PM

Dude, you can ALREADY do this with Visio. You just dont get the fancypants animated transition, which you can ALREADY do with Powerpoint.

Basically what you are all asking for is Powerpoint + Flow Charting. Which you can already do.

4/5/2008 2:00:24 PM

Well, does powerpoint ALREADY have the ability to edit the network diagram after its been exported from VISIO?? If so, then yes this is already available. Most organizations do not make network diagrams that dont get changed after originally designed, therefore EVERYONE who gets the powerpoint would essentially have to also have the source VISIOs, which is a terrible oversight.

If I understand you correctly, this is not possible yet, although a poor mans version can be hacked out using the two. Therefore, the need has not been met, and the software is lacking. End of story.

4/6/2008 9:42:37 AM

is this so?

4/6/2008 8:25:00 PM

So I went a tried this. You can embed visio docs in powerpoint. However they will be treated as one logical operator. So for the movement, youd need to drop invisible action targets on top.

The alternative is, build the flowchart in powerpoint. Unless you are generating your flowchart from data (and really using Visio's data model to do this) there's not really any reason to use visio for flowcharting or any other strictly visual diagramming.

Then you can do exactly what you want it to, just all in powerpoint.

Now if you want to use visio only, you still have choices:

If you want navigation during edit, add Double-Click behaviors to your object.
If you want navigation during presentation mode (f5), add hyperlinks to your object.

If you want some kind of fancy transition, you can do this SUPER easy with a macro in the Visio doc, to trigger on page change and have the current page zoom into the object and fade, and the new page zoom in and fade in.

Heck, if you REALLY wanted to do this as a product, you could make a Visio add-in in a day or two that would programmatically do this. If you did some shape-sheet mods with a couple of macro's you could do exactly what you are asking for.

4/7/2008 10:51:36 PM

Cool ... seems like that is something microsoft would have thought of before, as it seems like a pretty easy addition to the current product (visio). I would say that doing it in powerpoint is a waste, as you dont have access to all the engineering symbols and things in visio, if I am not mistaken.

Anyone know how to program macros for visio?

4/8/2008 8:19:00 AM

Visio is not really meant to do interactive charts.

and you can probably copy/paste the engineering symbols one at a time from Visio to Powerpoint, then just make copies in PPT to use them as you need. if you copy them out of Visio one at a time, then you can still act on them individually in PPT

4/8/2008 8:24:44 AM

^^ive done a LOT of extension to Visio in a previous job and ^ is really not true.

Visio, through a combination of VBA and Shapesheets allows you to do pretty much anything. You *can* go so far as to do flash-like animation if you wrote the VBA logic to handle the events. You can potentially extend it pretty far.

^Is right on about powerpoint. You can copy/paste over the stencils and reuse them. There may actually be a vss to wmf converter out there to do it all for you at once.

4/8/2008 10:56:21 AM