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There are two ways to work with CAD (CAD: Acronym for computer-aided design.) drawings in Microsoft Office Visio: you can insert them or convert them.

An inserted CAD drawing is a CAD drawing that you can view with Visio. Before you can edit an inserted CAD drawing, you must convert it into a Visio drawing.

A converted CAD drawing is a CAD drawing that you can edit with Visio. When you convert a CAD drawing, the blocks and entities are mapped to the closest equivalent Visio shapes.

If possible, do not convert CAD drawings. Working with inserted CAD drawings is faster and generally gives you better visual results. In particular, if you work with CAD drawings that are frequently updated, insert the CAD drawings and do not convert them so that you can easily replace them with newer versions.

You can edit inserted CAD drawings in a variety of ways. You can drag Visio shapes onto the drawing, hide or show layers, redline (redlining: To review and mark up or add comments to a drawing.) drawings, change the drawing scale, and crop (crop: To reduce an inserted object or picture. Although cropping appears to clip off parts of the object or picture, the clipped portions are retained in memory. Crop an object or picture by selecting it with the Crop tool and dragging one of its handles.) and pan (pan: To move an OLE object with the crop tool by holding down the left mouse button and shifting the object within the object's border.) the inserted drawing. Because the inserted CAD drawing is a copy of the original CAD drawing, the changes you make to the inserted drawing in Visio do not alter the original drawing.

If you want to delete, replace, or modify individual objects in the CAD drawing, convert only the layers containing those objects.

Supported CAD file formats