The tips are tested with Visio 2013.

Using Visio figures in Word documents

If a Visio figure is copied and pasted to Word, it remains editable. Use the Open in Visio button on the ribbon to edit the figure in Visio.

Setting glue

Go to the View tab, click Visual Aids. Set the Glue to checkboxes appropriately.

Disabling line jumps

Go to the Design tab, click Connectors and uncheck Show line jumps. Alternatively, click Page Setup. Choose the Layout and Routing tabs and set Add line jumps to None.

Remove background from connector text

On the Home tab click Paragraph. Choose the Text Block tab and set the Text background to None.

Using Visio figures in Word documents

If a Visio figure is copied and pasted to Word, it remains editable. Use the View | Open in Visio menu to edit the figure in Visio.

Exporting to PDF

• Scripts: https://github.com/szarnyasg/Technology-Cheat-Sheets/tree/master/Visio/convert
  • You should close Visio before using the scripts.
  • The convert-drag-and-drop.bat file expects a file as its argument – this can be achieved by dragging and dropping a Visio file on the script – and converts it to PDF.
  • The convert-all.bat file convert all Visio files in the directory to PDF.
  • The convert-smart.ps1 PowerShell script only converts the files that were updated since the corresponding PDF was generated. As the script is not signed, run it with the convert-smart.bat Batch script to override the default execution policy.
• Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4523705/convert-microsoft-visio-drawing-vsd-to-pdf-automatically

Adding control points

Source: http://packetlife.net/blog/2012/apr/11/drawing-continuous-connectors-visio/

You can add control points by pressing the Ctrl or the Shift key and clicking and dragging the line.