Maturity of Microsoft Visio importing/translation

Hello,

I have the latest version of Omnigraffle Pro version 7.2.2. While most of the import of Microsoft Visio documents e.g. .vsd (legacy) or new XML works there are “artifacts” in the translation which are not identical when rendered and opened. By not being identical I am referring to for example in a network diagram the connections are not aligned the same as in the original document.

I have tried saving the document in various formats .vsd, .vslx, etc. to see if made any difference and it does not. I have also noticed that text boxes in the form of a Microsoft Excel table do not show at all it just shows a greyed out box area.

Any help, advice, or notion to the fact that Omnigraffle knows this is a bug and is working on it would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Freemon

I have to say that I’ve found the same thing. I’d love to see better compatibility between OmniGraffle Pro 7.3 and Visio. I recently created the same diagram in ConceptDraw PRO 11 and OG Pro 7.3 beta and then saved it in Visio VSDX format (or VDX format in OG 7’s case). The ConceptDraw version was perfect in Visio 2013. The OG version was sadly not nearly as good and would require a lot of work in Visio to repair it.

I’m hoping that Omni will be able to improve the translation between the two. Having said that, I’ve had more success with the release version of OG Pro 7.3. It still isn’t quite as good, but the differences are more cosmetic rather than fundamental.

Hello,

I was contacted by a support engineer and they essentially stated that they had to reverse engineer the formats since they are proprietary and do not use open standards. I was hoping they could pay these companies a license for the format and offset the cost in the Omni “suite” but that is not the case at all, especially since Microsoft offers no competing products for OSX in Visio or MS Project.

As for ConceptDraw I would have to assume that is a similar case. It is literally a 80% - 90% solution of which you always will have to tweak the final output :-(

So hopefully their tone was “we aim to keep making it better”.

And it would be nice to see a call for samples to support that effort.

The conclusion and or summary of the conversation was that the process for reversing engineering OLE in Microsoft is not trivial. As a developer myself I completely get it. Microsoft will continue to modify and tweak their API’s to discourage 3rd parties, Libre Office, etc. So unless OmniGroup has a partnership for the license of that translation it will always be a game where OminGroup is chasing perfection.

I was under the impression that Microsoft has partnerships with many companies for integration. My hope was that this would be the case here. Why? Because Microsoft has made no effort to port Visio or MS Project over to OSX. So Omnigraffle and Omniplan should pose no threat in my opinion and Microsoft has had their office suite ported over for well over a decade.