I’ve always thought Pivot Tables in Excel were useful! Sadly never got to use one for a real project. I’m slowly getting re-acquinted with Visio - as I’ll need to use it alot in my new role. I was quite surprised to discover that Visio 2007 is now much more than a flowcharting application. Visio 2007 has some cool data visualization tools. The PivotDiagram uses data from an Excel Pivot table and helps visualize complex relationships. Visio makes it easy to link data to any diagram - a feature called Data Graphics. The example that caught my attension, was a Network diagram where all the server data was read in from a spreadsheet. This is a great idea, if their are many Servers at your workplace, with server name and function changes happening ever so often. I’ll keep sharing my experiences with Visio.