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Tricks for IA: copy and paste from Visio

I’ve seen people export stuff in Visio into images, and then paste those into Word documents. There’s an easier and better way: you can copy and paste stuff from Visio straight into Word, and it’ll look better (and print nicer) too than if you turn things into images first. One disadvantage: you can only paste what you can copy, so backgrounds don’t get copied along.

Interestingly, if you use a program like Windows Live Writer (which I use for this blogpost), you can also copy and paste from Visio straight into the program. The objects will be turned into images and uploaded. Funky!

Here’s an example, copied from Visio.

image

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Information architecture, ia for beginners. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

3 Responses to “Tricks for IA: copy and paste from Visio”

  1. Jo Pitts Says:
    May 22nd, 2008 at 5:21 pm

    Arguably a better approach (at least re:Word) is to embed the visio document inside the word document. That way it remains fully editable as a visio document, does retain backgrounds, and prints/scales perfectly

    The down side is that you can end up with massive documents if you have a large number of visio diagrams

    Cheers
    Jo

  2. Visio Guy Says:
    May 24th, 2008 at 6:48 pm

    If you paste normally into Word, you will embed a Visio object, that can be edited, in-place inside of Word. This also carries all the Visio overhead, that you might not need.

    If you do Paste Special, you can choose to paste as a Windows Metafile, which will maintain vectors for smooth printing, or you can paste as a bitmap as well.

    Cheers,

    Visio Guy

  3. Peter Says:
    May 25th, 2008 at 2:40 am

    I’ll try paste special next time :)

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