GraphVizio – A Graphviz addin for Visio
In the process of analysing a client’s existing database, I used Visio’s reverse-engineering tool. It works well, but the resulting diagram was an incomprehensible bowl of spaghetti. Visio does have a “Layout shapes” command, which appears to work by moving shapes with repulsive forces and the result is, not surprisingly, repulsive.
What I wanted was a tool which would unravel the spaghetti, so that I could get a grasp of the relationships, edit and revise them and layout again in an iterative process.
Searching for a solution, I found three layout programs, none of which have a Visio interface:
- Microsoft Automatic Graph Layout (MSAGL), formerly known as GLEE The first version, GLEE, is free whereas MSAGL costs between 99 USD and 279 USD depending on where you buy it.
- Tom Sawyer Layout is also a graph layout library, the price isn’t disclosed on their website.
- Graphviz from AT&T research labs, reputed to have the most sophisticated layout algorithms, is free.
Given that the best quality was to be found in the free library, I made the obvious choice.
It took me over a year and some 11’000 lines of VB to get Visio and Graphviz to co-exist; marrying a Unix-style command-line program with a WYSIWYG interface, both with quirks to numerous to mention, was far more challenging than I initially thought.
The result, unimaginatively called GraphVizio, is available here, I hope you’ll find it useful.
My colleagues and I here in Mexico are very impressed with the solution, we applied the Add in in Visio 2010 and the results are impresive !
In just two days we were able to analyze Cobol code using the outstanding work from Graphviz team and you ! Thank you !
Amazing! … Is there a way to make it unfuddle swimlane diagrams? It takes those and turns them into flowcharts.
We have a dot file that has clusters representing servers, with processes inside the server/cluster, but when using GraphVizio to import into Vizio, it drops the clusters. Any suggestions?
Thanks,
- N
You know, this is amazing. I hope people realize that even though it does not do everything (like the clusters above), it does sooooo very much. I am using it for PERT charts and it’s awesome.
I do love this software. I just upgraded to a 64 bit version of 2010…and now the menu won’t show up in the add-in section.
I know you don’t support directly, but you do have any hints on how to get it to work? Or could I migrate this project forwards for you? It’s too valuable for me not to use. The 2010 auto layout is much more cumbersome.
Hi, I’m trying to use this with a simple CSV file and it keeps showing an error that says ‘line must contain a single comma’.
Does anyone have any solution for this?
Many thanks
To avoid cluttering this thread, I reply and fix questions, as opposed to comments, directly to their authors.
If you have a specific question, do feel free to contact me directly at graphvizio@calvert.ch
Hi,
Is there anyway to control the size of the boxes that are drawn? Or how about causing long labels to break across multiple lines?
Nice tool!
Astonishing! Working fine with Visio 2003 on XP. I have seen a few crashes on imports of existing dot files, but overall very good. Much better than using the cvs version of Graphviz to generate vml files to import to Visio.
A truly groundbreaking enhancement.
Thanks for all your hard work.