Taking Stock

A Free Document Productivity Tool for Word

I have been working on some process documentation in the past few weeks, so I'll give the Word macros a break and post some of the Visio tools that I have developed over the last couple of years.

Hand-drawn Process Flow Shapes

My first Visio post will be a set of process flow shapes with a funky hand-drawn look. This signals informality, and promotes discussion. I think they are fun to use too.

The shapes can be used for flowcharts, but there are extensions so you get a decent subset of the BPNM shape palette with shape variants you can switch on and off.

Other Upcoming Visio Posts

My Visio tools provide efficiency improvement features that you can use everyday.  They are especially useful for people laying out process flows, context diagrams and preparing simple graphic designs for summarising business issues and solutions.

The Visio posts coming soon are:

• Hand-drawn process flow shapes - stencil and template
• SmartAlign - Enhanced Horizontal and Vertical alignment tools
• SmartSize - An smart tool for consistently sizing shapes
• SmartLink - Connector link tools used when adjusting process flows

I'll also be adding a range of smart shapes for reducing the effort when BPMN diagrams - I'll publish a stencil and template for these too.

I also regularly use a set of page re-size and layout tools which I'll also publish.

Word Tools

I have not finished with Word, I have the following tools yet to publish.  Let me know if you want any expedited.  The upcoming tools are:

• SmartAnnotation - Enhanced annotation
• SmartBrowse - Extensions to the standard browse tools for managing reviews.
• Advanced document review tools for managing editing tasks
• Advanced Table formatting - quickly inserting tables, formatting subsections and making tables consistent across the document.

There are one or two other small items which I use a lot - things like cleaning up double spaces, dropping bookmarks,