[Minneapolitan]

Hey there - I've found plenty of info on opening .VSDs in Omnigraffle, but does it work the other way around? Can you open Omnigraffle files in Visio?

[Brian]

While it would be possible for the folks at Microsoft to add code which handled OmniGraffle's native file format, I don't think they have done so.

[wbrisett]

I do a lot of importing and exporting of Visio files. You can export the files as VDX files which work fairly well. There are a couple of gotchas that you might want to look out for.

Transparency works very different between the two, so if you set something with say 40% transparency on the Mac, when you open the file in Visio, you'll immediately notice that all transparency is gone. This is true the other way too. If you set something with transparency in Visio, it's gone in OmniGraffle. I don't have any good solutions for this one.

The other thing that constantly gets me in trouble is shading. The shadows look great in OmniGraffle, but when opened in Visio, they tend to look very different. I have found that unless absolutely necessary, I stay away from shadows.

Otherwise the conversions between the two go very smoothly.

Wayne