Here are a couple of links from MS about installing Visio OOPS! It took them almost a year to fix for business users.
Initially, they made it impossible to install Visio (and Project) with ANY other Office bundle. ! More likely, that home users could not AFFORD to use at the price point MS is selling Visio. They decided that Visio was a "business" product that home users could not possibly want to use. The problem you encountered was an "improvement" MS introduced in with Office 2016. I don't enjoy spending as much time as I have hunting for the ideal solution. It's also familiar/intuitive enough to old-school Office users and feels like a regular graphics application to those of us less Office-oriented.
On Windows there is also the fully-featured desktop client. It has an online client that works in Chrome in Mac, Linux, Windows, and FreeBSD. It is primarily click-and-drag and has great suggested connecting, sizing, grouping, and arranging features. The simplest tool I've seen that just works is Visio. Omnigraffle is out of the picture since I need to be able to share and use graphs across Mac, Windows, and Linux users - without needing to describe multiple tools and conversion between formats or anything. Most other tools I've found when googling around require the same level of effort to use as Draw.io: AsciiFlow, Gliffy.
Sketch for example.)ĭraw.io is free but requires you to do so much work yourself to create objects, size them, group them, connect them, arrange them. However I doubt that is the case as over time there have been more fully-featured, once-desktop-only applications competing successfully cross-platform. Or there is just no market for cross-platform applications. I've been looking off and on for the past year or two.
It’s a Mac environment that is similar to Processing, but is based on Python and has built-in PDF export. Recently I used plotdevice.io to build a 3d line renderer for a bunch of diagrams in a book. I also worked at LucidChart for a while, and I know first-hand it’s very powerful and quite good compared to almost everything online, especially for flowcharts and serveral pre-baked styles of data driven diagrams. We used Limnu to create all the diagrams for the online book “Ray Tracing in One Weekend.”. That might not be what you mean by “beautiful diagrams”, but personally I find a good whiteboard diagram quite beautiful. We intentionally kept the tools simple so you can iterate and obsess over the idea rather than the look. For me it has been especially good for online targeted diagrams, e.g., for blog posts & web pages.įor my shameless plug, I helped build a whiteboarding tool that is great for simple hand-drawn diagrams, and truly looks whiteboardy. I really like gravit.io as an online lightweight version of Illustrator. (And I really really wish something would.) It is one of the very few Java tools, that really works well for me.įor ASCII I recommend taking a look at Emacs artist mode, especially, if you are already using Emacs to write the code.įor serious print work, still nothing beats Illustrator. + can add multiple labels to a shape or edge (multiplicities in class diagrams for example, or cardinalities in ERMs)Īnd probably more thing I don't remember right now. + many settings for shapes and independently for labels + when edges cross there is a setting to display "bridges" + moving anything will bring up helping lines and snapping to certain alignments + connecting edges and shapes so that they stick together, still enforcing rectangular edges, something I find very difficult with other tools like Inkscape and being able to connect the edges to any point of the shape, not so limited like Dia. + Export formats: SVG, PDF, PNG, graphml (its own format, so that you can edit later), others - Also looking like the diagram you created and looking clean, now like Dia + performance when dragging stuff around, no lags like in many browser apps + far more functionality than things like drawio Sequence diagrams are a bit slow to make with it, because yeD not knowing their semantics and not doing much for you.Īpart from that, it has many features I depend on and that save time: "How do I teach it to make these halfcircle-circle joints of component diagrams?" The only areas where I had issues with it, that I can remember were:
It is _the one_ diagram making tool I go to, when I make any diagrams related to software development. Very surprised to see no one mentioning yeD here.