Recomendations for flowcharting software
 

Any recommendations for software to produce complex flowcharts?

I've built some basic ones in PowerPoint but a new client is going to require some pretty complex ones. I've investigated Visio and that seems to be the way to go, but I wanted to get some other opinions.

Thanks in advance!

I'm not sure if it's the kind of product you're looking for, but you should take a look at graphviz to see if it fits your needs.

Visio is about the best I've used and I've spent a ton of time doing process flow charts.

There was a freeware one available years ago - ABC Flowcharter I think - that was not bad for free.

Ditto for Visio. Lots of reasons. As an industry standard, it has lots of add-ins available, particularly the technical version. I often have to diagram networks, and the fact that I can find templates for the vast majority of equipment is a great help, e.g., I can draw a rack of equipment that looks like the actual rack because of my Cisco, APC, HP, Dell, and assorted telco templates that look just like the actual product.

Lots of less expensive (some even free) alternatives are probably fine for you to do org charts, programmers' data flow diagrams, simple logic flowcharts, etc. But Visio is really useful when you need something more technical.

For something off-the-shelf, I'd suggest Visio too.

Visio here as well for flow charts (I tend to use it for Network Diagrams though).

I had a new user who had to use visio on their first day (an ex nurse). Considering she wasn't confident with computers, she was knocking out fairly good diagrams in a few hours and building confidence in it.

Another vote for Visio. As much as Microsoft may be the evil empire to some, it works well and it's easy to take the flowcharts and dump them into other MS applications.

... which they brought Shapewear out many moons ago to aquire Visio in 2000.

Funny that ;)

Visio is the likely answer.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record ... VISIO.

I used ABC Flowchart for years, it was much easier (for intelligent flowcharting) than Visio, which was mainly a drawing tool. The product is now "FlowChart" by iGrafx, and it's expensive.

Visio all the way :D

I will actually recommend something else. Visio is good for many things, but for Flowcharts I find that Smartdraw is better.

There's a 7 day trial available, exports are available to most formats.

Visio as well.
Get yourself a technet subscription so you can try all versions for free for a year+

Thanks for the responses. It looks like Visio is the way to go. A feature that I was not aware of is to be able to build project schedules. I've never used this before and it looks like it will be a major benefit to me.

It also looks like the professional version is the way to go. I have a need to produce floor plans of manufacturing facilities every so often and this is included in the professional version.

One more question...any recommendations on sources for sample templates? I've always built charts and graphs in PowerPoint but looking at some of the examples that are possible in Visio...wow!

Thanks again!