OmniGraffle Pro and Visio

Submitted by reeses on Tue, 2004-04-20 13:18. | computing | Mac

OmniGroup claims that OmniGraffle Pro can import and export Visio documents. 'Great,' I think, Visio documents are one of the huge pains about being a Mac person. I hate asking people to send PDFs or to print things out for me, or worse, having to wait for Virtual PC to start up just so I can view a file.

I finally broke down and went to the Omni site to buy OGPro, when I noticed a "Trial License". Fantastic! I only need it for one file right now, and I figure I can buy it next time. I download the software, add the license, and joyously go to open up the Visio doc.

Wait, so while I can coexist with Visio people, I still have to ask them for favors to accomodate me? What is the point of claiming support for an application when you don't support the default file format? Anyone can support an XML format, and I'm sure other applications do. It's the structured storage that is the difficult task. It's like all of the mail clients that claim to support Exchange, but really, only support Exchange 2k if it exposes its store via WebDAV and IMAP.

This is the only thing I need OGPro for, and I'm completely willing to pay the fee, if it actually worked!

As it is, I'm back to running Visio in Virtual PC, which is like running Visio on your old p200.

Oh, wait, but I'm not, because it's hanging at 13% of "Updating directory cache", which apparently indicates a broken VB6 binding. Unfortunately, the visio.exe /r trick isn't working. Back to PDF...