Visio

1. It is very flexible and intuitive to use. I really enjoy the 'snap' guidance it has, where, regardless of where you are on the page, it will give you visual guidance markers to suggest where you may want to drop a box/step based on the alignment/centering of other boxes/steps in similar vertical or horizontal planes. 2. I also really appreciate that you can select a particular section of the flow and drag/drop it while retaining connections between steps. 3. Unlike some online flow builders, visio has its own file type you can open natively on your PC with Visio, so you can easily create multiple versions or iterations of a given flow/file. While you can clone/copy and edit similarly in web-based builders, it just feels more normal to do this with the live file collab.

The way Visio allows you to create and map workflows is really great, with amazing functionalities, and well organized, Visio still for me the top-end solution for building flows. It provides good collaboration and flexibility whenever process mappings happen. It could integrate process mining or insights tools by leveraging AI, while not being a simple tool for flows but also providing suggestions.

I appreciate the assets and templates available, which as previously mentioned, expedite the creation process. It is very easy to collaborate with peers, sharing access to documents or visual concepts and immediately get their feedback. Last, I would say, I like how it integrates with other Microsoft software. As a heavy SharePoint user, it flows into our business processes and doesn't feel like an additional space to navigate to.

Not a huge issue or deterrent by any means, but I don't love that I haven't found a way to expand the size of the workable area of the Visio workspace. I'd really like to see a way to just drag the workspace slightly longer or wider as needed. I do think there is a way to expand that workspace, but it should allow for a means to do so more dynamically. I also wish the program was smarter about sizing text to the *shape* of the step that it is being typed in (ex. autofit the text in a diamond-shaped decision step to the shape of a diamond). Neither of these are showstoppers, and I'd still recommend the program up and down

The on-premise version still quite superior than the cloud one. On premise should be included on the standard MS package together with MS Excel, PowerPoint etc.. It could be also better integrated with PowerPoint for better visibility, while many flows are built in Visio, usually they are presented in PowerPoint version, flow could be optmized for better visualization.

I wish their was more freedom to create exactly whatever you wanted. It can be difficult to freeform and modify shapes like some other CAD software. I would also say, there is a bit of a delay in response time with collaboration. I don't know if that is a result of the platform itself, but I'm not always immediately notified of a new comment or update. Finally, I think it has its benefits, but I limit it to process mapping and visualizing the flow of ideas rather than a design specific tool.