New task panes   A collection of new task panes, docked by default to the right of the drawing page, gives you easy access to many Visio features. The task panes include:

• Getting Started, which gives you quick access to your most recently used drawings.
• Help, where you can use the table of contents or search to find the information you want.
• Clip Art, for fast retrieval of clip art, with an even larger collection to choose from if you're connected to the Web.
• Research, from which you can quickly refer to information online and on your computer without leaving your Microsoft Office program. You can easily insert definitions, stock quotes, and other research information into your document, as well as customize settings to suit your research needs. The new Research task pane is also available on the Tools menu.
• Search Results, which displays the results of your latest search, including research, Help topics, and clip art searches.
• New Drawing, where you can choose whether to start your drawing by opening a new or existing drawing, or by using a template.
• Template Help, which displays help designed specifically for the template you're using.
• Shared Workspace, where you can share a drawing with others by using the Microsoft Windows® SharePoint™ Services features included with Visio 2003.
• Document Updates, which allows you to update your copy of a drawing that's on a Document Workspace to reflect changes made by other users.
• Reviewing, where you can mark up, add comments, or view the comments of others on a review copy of a drawing.

Personalized shape management   Visio 2003 makes it easier to organize the shapes you use most often on separate stencils so you can find them quickly and easily. Use the new My Shapes folder to save shapes to a Favorites stencil or to appropriately named custom stencils.

Select multiple shapes   There are now three easy ways to select multiple shapes: Use the Pointer tool or the Lasso Select tool to drag a selection net around all the shapes, or hold down the SHIFT key and click each shape.

DWG Converter   The improved DWG converter assures you that the drawings you convert to Visio will have higher fidelity to your original CAD files, so you can work with spaces and shapes even more accurately than before.

Business Process   The new Business Process category provides a collection of templates you can use for specific business process documentation efforts including Six Sigma, SAP, and ISO, as well as tools for general process management needs including audit diagrams, basic flowcharts, cause and effect diagrams, cross-functional flowcharts, data flow diagrams (Microsoft Office Visio Professional 2003 only), work flow diagrams, event-driven process chain (EPC) diagrams, and fault tree analysis diagrams.

Calendar   Import schedule information from Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 into the improved Calendar template, and then easily customize it to suit your needs. Compare multiple schedules, create a calendar of any number of weeks, and highlight important dates with eye-catching Calendar Art shapes.

Space Plan (Visio Professional 2003)   The new startup wizard helps you get started quickly, and the improved import data wizard makes it easier to import data into your space plan, or any Visio drawing. Once the data is in your drawing, new color-coding and labeling options make your data more accessible, and when you're done, new Visio smart tags even help coworkers install a printer right from your drawing.

Basic Network Diagram   Use the enhanced Basic Network Diagram template to create presentation-quality diagrams that logically show how different pieces of equipment can be installed. New shapes have a dramatically improved appearance and you can now choose from 22 pre-defined definitions to generate reports of your shapes.

Rack diagram (Visio Professional 2003)   Quickly sketch out the rack space requirements of new equipment using network equipment shapes with industry-standard measurements. The shapes are designed to fit together precisely, making it easy to stack shapes in a rack and size them appropriately. You can store data, such as serial number and location, with the shapes and then generate richly detailed reports.

Microsoft Windows XP User Interface (Visio Professional 2003)   Prototype user interfaces with this template that includes all the controls you need to rough out your UI before you begin coding. Create drop-down menus, tabbed dialog boxes, and toolbars that conform to the Windows XP look and feel.

Ink   Use ink features to create hand-drawn shapes and insert handwritten notes when reviewing a drawing. Like other Visio shapes, you can copy, move, and resize ink shapes, as well as add them to custom stencils to make them available for other drawings. You can use the ink features in Visio on tablet computers and on desktop and laptop computers.

Microsoft Office Visio Viewer 2003   With the new Visio Viewer even people who don’t have Visio can view and print Visio drawings and diagrams in Microsoft Internet Explorer. With Visio Viewer it's easy to distribute your drawings to team members, partners, customers, and others. Visio Viewer is available for download on Microsoft Office Online.

Document Workspaces   Create a Document Workspace to simplify the process of co-writing, editing, and reviewing documents with others in real time. A Document Workspace site is a Windows SharePoint Services site that is centered around one or more documents and is typically created when you use e-mail to send a document as a shared attachment.

Getting Started Tutorial   On the Help menu, click Getting Started Tutorial to start a self-paced introduction to the Visio drawing environment. The tutorial uses four popular Visio diagram types to teach you the basic skills you'll use to create and share your own Visio diagrams.

Diagram Gallery   On the Help menu, click Diagram Gallery to see at a glance what the different Visio drawing types are for and to get ideas for your own drawings.

Online Help   Connect to the Web to see a richer and more up-to-date set of Help topics and articles.

Language handling with document creation and sharing   Support for Unicode, End User Defined Characters (EUDC) sets, and GB18030 is new in Visio 2003. With Unicode you can create drawings in many different languages, create drawings that contain multiple languages, and share and collaborate on drawings across multiple languages. With EUDC you can form Asian names and other Asian words using characters that are not available in standard screen and printer fonts. With support for GB18030, which is a new Chinese character-encoding standard, you can create drawings containing Chinese characters from this new character encoding set.

ActiveX control   Visio 2003 makes Visio available as an ActiveX control, so you can preserve the unity of your host application's design. You can tightly constrain drawing functionality to just what is required by your host application, and your host application controls the user interface.

Formula Tracing window   To assist in the task of identifying interdependencies between ShapeSheet cells, you can use this window to trace both dependent and precedent cells of a given cell.

Macro recorder   Developers new to the Visio platform will find Visio Automation easier to learn, now that Visio comes with the macro recorder. If you’re not sure how to perform a given Visio task programmatically, you can turn on the macro recorder and manually perform the action. The macro recorder translates your actions into Visual Basic® for Applications (VBA) code. You can also modify the code generated by the macro recorder to ease the pain of performing repetitive tasks.

ShapeStudio   The ShapeStudio add-on brings a professional, world-class development environment to Visio for creating SmartShapes. By addressing such areas as specification, validation, and maintenance, ShapeStudio allows the SmartShape developer to concentrate on the drawing aspect of shape development. This add-on is available with the Microsoft Office Visio 2003 Software Developers Kit (SDK).

Style Explorer window   This window provides shape developers with a quick way to determine which shape cells inherit from a given style, or the style from which a given cell inherits its value.