We want to make it easy for everyone to view Visio drawings, especially the modern-looking and professional diagrams made in the new Visio. Visio Services, however, is a much more powerful tool for interacting with Visio drawings. The viewer is very useful for viewing Visio drawings, especially when you don’t have Visio or Visio Services. The viewer is also something that you install on your computer. In comparison, the Visio Viewer provides a static view of the drawing: users cannot add comments and the drawing does not update as data changes.

This makes Visio Services great for creating dashboards and keeping people up to date with the latest information. With Visio Services, users can also add comments to the drawing and, when a drawing is connected to data, Visio Services can refresh the data and update the shapes in the drawing that are linked to data. It works with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, and it includes enhancements for touch and for mobile devices with smaller screens. Nothing needs to be installed on the user’s computer, and, in fact, the file can be viewed from a wide variety of devices–desktops, laptops, mobile phones, and tablets. You can upload a Visio file to SharePoint and then everyone else can view it. Visio Services is part of SharePoint and SharePoint Online in Office 365. To understand the differences, we have to stop and talk a moment about Visio Services. These are both products available to view Visio drawings without having Visio installed, but they are very different! One of the top questions we get about the Visio Viewer is how it differs from Visio Services. The options to pan, zoom and switch to different pages, and the right mouse menu are available in the Windows Explorer preview pane. The drawing will be displayed in the preview pane. In Windows Explorer, click the View tab, select Preview pane, then single-click on a Visio drawing. You can also preview a Visio drawing directly in Windows. Previewing Visio files in Windows Explorer

Right-click on the preview image to see some of these options.Įven if you have Visio, this is a quick way to take a peek at the drawing without leaving Outlook. You can pan and zoom the drawing, and switch to different pages. In Outlook, you can simply single-click on a Visio drawing sent as an attachment and the viewer will display it in Outlook. The Visio Viewer also allows users to preview Visio drawings in Microsoft Outlook. The viewer allows you to pan and zoom, navigate to different pages, see shape properties, and set different viewing options. Internet Explorer will open, and the viewer will render the drawing in the browser. If you don’t have Visio installed and don’t have access to Visio Services on SharePoint, viewing Visio drawings is still as simple as double-clicking the drawing in Windows Explorer. See plans and pricing View Visio files without Visio

Microsoft visio viewer free download