Granted, I'm not a Visio power user, but I'm hard pressed to find anything that Visio does that OpenOffice doesn't do. It just feels like a modern, intuitive application. It's somewhat of a pain to install on Windows, but it was dead simple in Ubuntu just search for 'clip art' in the package manager GUI.Īctually using OpenOffice Draw was a blast. However, there is a great royalty free library available called Open Clip Art. By default, OpenOffice has a very limited library. Visio comes with a clip art library that includes various depictions of servers, routers, networks, etc. The diagrams themselves might be anything from how SMTP traffic flows from our system, over the WAN and back again, to data-center architecture, to the internal workings of a particular piece of code. Would OpenOffice Draw work instead of Visio?Ī typical Visio I might produce is a collection of clip art, shapes, text, connectors and arrows. But, every once in a while, I need to make some diagrams for a feature spec.

OpenOffice Writer and Calc have been very competent substitutes for Word and Excel. In an effort to get off of Microsoft Office, I have been trying to use alternatives instead.

Import openoffice draw into visio