Frustrated With Visio files
March 28, 2009 by Clair Ching
Filed under How To
There really seems to be no way to open and edit files created by Visio on Linux. I have been trying to figure things out this week when I received files for work. A bunch of Visio files. Unfortunately for me, OpenOffice.org cannot open it, same thing goes for Dia and Kivio. I even installed a Visio Viewer application on Wine but it doesn’t seem to work either.
Screenshot credit: Fermin Hernandez, 2009.
What’s with Visio? Every person who is working in an office which has a lot of diagrams for their business analysis needs would probably encounter Visio at least once in his/her life. A lot of companies seem to invest in this diagramming tool and as such, they would usually all have the application installed on their machines. But if you are like me, a free and open source software user who has not much need for Visio until recently, then the difficulty to work with others with regards to diagramming will be more difficult.
My solution to this problem was not that simple. I had to find a spare machine with Microsoft Visio and for me to not have to re-download other reference documents, I used Synergy and QuickSynergy to make things easier. Through Synergy I am able to use the other computer easily.
Oh well, if you have other means of viewing and editing Visio files on your computer, I hope you would share them here too.
The only solution i found is to use VirtualBox and a windows xp virtual machine, that way i can use visio and outlook at work and still have fedora on my laptop.
Yeah, VirtualBox is probably the way to go, but it’s undoubtedly not an ideal solution.
Hi Clair,
I’m using visual paradgim’s visual analyst program which does a lot of nice modelling. I’m using it for uni, and work (a practising BA).
it’s running on my osx laptop, but it’s a java app so perhaps it runs on linux too. it has an option to import xml visio docs, but the only ones I had on my laptop were vsd’s and it just ignores them.
it’s commercialware, but maybe it’s cost competitive with visio?
Dallas