A Short Guide to Scheming, Plotting, and Diagramming

or

Going with the Flow (charts)
Bernard & Shepard Gorman

Words are handy. I’ve been using them since I was about a year old. However, I’ve also been recognizing images since I first opened my baby blue peepers during the middle of the last century. For me and for many of my students, a well-drawn diagram can instantly transform many abstract concepts and complex sequences into immediate knowledge in ways that would be impossible to convey in words.

Most of us are comfortable with word processors but we get nervous when it comes to drawing diagrams. This needn’t be the case because excellent diagramming tools are available to nearly anyone. In fact, some are built into the software we constantly use and others can be obtained for little cost and, in some cases, as freeware.

Few computer users realize that Microsoft Office products, including Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all have a sophisticated diagram editor that’s capable of making organization charts, Venn diagrams, radial charts, cycle diagrams, and pyramid charts. All you have to do to access the diagram creator feature is to click "Insert" and then click "Diagram" and a rich menu will open for you. The organization chart below will give you a feel for the kind of charts you can make in Microsoft Office.

For those who want somewhat more flexibility and more features, there’s Microsoft Office Visio which costs from $99-$200, OrgPlus (http://www.hallogram.com/orgplus/) costing from around $200-$450, and SmartDraw (http://www.smartdraw.com/) which costs about $150-$200. All of these very sophisticated programs work seamlessly with Microsoft Office and other Windows products and each one can be downloaded for a free trail period.

If you’re on a limited budget or, worse yet, if you're flat broke, there are some freeware solutions. Of course, freeware is usually less polished but I’m going to recommend some programs you’ll probably like to try. In addition, if you don’t like them, I promise that you’ll get your money back!

Our first free diagramming software is Dia, (http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/), an open-source program that was designed to duplicate many of Visio’s features. It’s capable of drawing a wide variety of diagrams and it saves output to XML and Extended PostScript (EPS) formats.

Dia’s control panel floats on your screen

And its main chart area workspace can be seen below

It takes a while to be comfortable with Dia but, once you use it, you can whip up some handsome graphics.

Our second free program is EVE (http://www.goosee.com/goosee/index.shtml), which is an acronym for the Embedded Vector Editor. This program is tiny (less that 200K) but it can draw a remarkable variety of diagrams as seen in a screen captured from their website. Eve’s output can be exported to Adobe’s SVG format, to Windows Metafile (WMF) and Extended Metafile (EMF) formats.