Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Hi,

I have been looking for an alternative for visio and landed up in openoffice draw .
But, i would like to know if openoffice draw supports the feature of opening a visio file so that i can edit it in draw .
I checked the OpenOffice Draw FAQ - http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wik ... n/FAQ/Draw
I wonder why the FAQ does not talk about the feature of opening visio file in draw ?

I searched the internet and landed in old threads that discuss regd this feature in Draw.

I got the below link that is in openoffice.org, but it does not show the latest news.
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bu ... rysort=new

But, it does show that it has been assigned to requirements , but it does not display if it is being supported in the latest version .
Any ideas ?

Thx in advans,
Karthik Balaguru

On this site users help users, no developers here.
The status of new means, it is a need recognized.

Requirement - need to evaluate the issue regarding project can solve the issue in technical meanings, such as has a specification, or any source, or needs a engineering effort to create specifications. Second part project have an any resource for effort.

The status of issue showing, good to have Visio support, but no specification and no resource.

As I know correctly the Visio format is proprietary, no free/open information about it, need lot of engineering effort, for this no resources with OOo limited staff.

If you needs this feature, and have enough money you could sponsor the development of visio filters for Draw.
Another possibility for developers, create specification and do coding.

If you not fit into two category, only possibility is wait for a solution.

See issue handling webpage for the details.

It's the same old story - Microsoft don't want others to be able to read and write to their formats, so they keep themsecret. The .doc, .xls etc formats were only very recently released to the public domain, and the implementations within OOo were done by reverse engineering, before that date. The Visio format is something that can (as far as I know) be opened only by Visio.

If you didn't t need to use old files and only create new images, you could have had a look at Dia for Windows, which is an open-source application with a lot of Visio's capability.

Karthik,

Do you have access to VISIO or just the .vsd files?

One application encodes your data in a way so only Microsoft software can read them properly. This is the busines model of all proprietary software since decades. Because those file formats are very, very complex there can not be one software to open all your files. This is not possible, not even theoretically. OOo and Microsoft's doc/xls/ppt file formats have been around for 2 decades, but still OOo has difficulties to decypher those files in exactly the same manner as MS does.

More information about how to open Visio files in Draw: http://fridrich.blogspot.ch/2012/12/lib ... er-20.html