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Flowcharts with DIA

Today I needed to make some simple flowcharts to mirror our invoicing path in the office. I set out to do this using PowerPoint, yet I quickly realised that this was not the right tool for the job. It was time consuming and not very user-friendly. Options and features were hidden in various menus, and it took time to find them, test them and then use them. To be fair, I do not think that PowerPoint is the right tool for such a task.

Microsoft Visio would be more applicable, but we do not have it in the office.

A helpful member over at ubuntuforums.org mentioned Dia, a free and cross-platform tool with which you can make diagrams and flowcharts. From the project website:

Dia is roughly inspired by the commercial Windows program 'Visio', though more geared towards informal diagrams for casual use. It can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams. It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a subset of SVG to draw the shape.

I thought I would give it a try. A Windows installer was included which installed without any problems on my Windows 2000 machine. With around 12MB file size, Dia is a relatively small application and so the installation was quite fast.

Dia is intuitive and very easy to use. Even someone like me, who does not need and therefore does not use PowerPoint or Visio, would have no trouble understanding the tools in Dia.

One thing does require getting used to however, the workspace you see in Dia is relative. In other words, while you do see dark blue solid outlines which highlight an A4 page for example, Dia while scale your work if you go beyond these outlines. If you try out Dia you will see what I mean. Make a box and fill it with text then print it out, it will be huge. Now add more boxes (especially horizontally) and you will notice that the boxes will be scaled to fit one page (if you choose to have them printed like this) or more pages.

I found this to be a rather good feature, I did not have to worry about spacing or alignment and could focus on the content.

A screenshot of Dia in action:

Dia gets a thumbs up from me, stable, functional and promising.