Office 365 was one of Microsoft’s reactions to this, but I still haven’t met any company that uses Office 365 as it’s primary infrastructure, although Microsoft has a nice site called NowOnOffice365.com that lists a bunch.
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If you're still unable to sign in, read. ISSUE After connecting to Outlook for Windows (Outlook 2016, 2013, 2010 versions) to your Outlook.com email account, your may experience the following:. Your email account name shows up as outlooklong series of letters and [email protected] in the Folder Pane and when composing emails using Outlook for Windows. Recipients will also receive the email from the sender with the outlooklong series of letters and [email protected] format. When recipients reply to the email, the email bounces and you may receive the message “Undeliverable message when you send Internet mail in Outlook.” This issue only impacts customers using Outlook for Windows.
Emails sent via Outlook.com on the web works correctly and emails will be sent with the correct email address. STATUS The Outlook client does not currently support using a non Microsoft domain primary alias. For the time being to get the account to work in Outlook you need to change the primary alias to a Microsoft domain account, such as @outlook.com or @hotmail.com. The Outlook Team is doing work that will enable some supported use of aliases in the near future. We will update this topic as soon as the functionality is available. WORKAROUND This issue occurs for users with multiple account aliases.
We are actively working on a fix. In the meantime, to fix this issue, please do the following: Note: If you do not have another alias, click the link on the page to create one 'Click Add email and a new alias'. Then choose the option 'Create a new email address and add it as an alias'. Go to and sign in to your Outlook.com account. Set your Outlook.com email as the primary alias. In Outlook for Windows, remove and re-add the account.
See the steps in this article. Last updated: February 8, 2017 ISSUE If Outlook is connected to a primary Outlook.com account that is also connected to other secondary non-Microsoft accounts (such as Gmail, Yahoo, etc.), when sending an email in Outlook, you are not able to choose the other secondary connected account as the 'From' sending account. If you manually type in the secondary connected account email address in the 'From' field, the email is sent as 'On behalf of' your primary Outlook.com account. STATUS: WORKAROUND Outlook supports sending from a secondary connected account for Microsoft owned domains such as @outlook.com, @live.com, @hotmail.com but has not implemented this functionality for third-party domains. The Outlook team is listening to your feedback and investigating adding this functionality to future updates. Please vote up the request and add any feedback on UserVoice:.
In the meantime, please use the following workaround: WORKAROUND You can also add the secondary connected accounts (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) in Outlook.com as additional accounts in the Outlook profile. In Outlook, choose the File tab. Under Account Information, choose Add Account.
On the Auto Account Setup page, enter your name, email address, and password, and then choose Next. Last updated: May 2, 2017 ISSUE When you try to accept a shared Outlook.com calendar using your Office 365 for business account in Outlook 2016, you might receive the 'Something went wrong' error or your sign-in might fail. STATUS: WORKAROUND To access the calendar shared with your Office 365 for business account, you’ll need to accept the invitation from Outlook on the web, iOS, or Android.
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Very surprised to see no one mentioning yeD here. It is the one diagram making tool I go to, when I make any diagrams related to software development. The only areas where I had issues with it, that I can remember were: - 'How do I teach it to make these halfcircle-circle joints of component diagrams?' - Sequence diagrams are a bit slow to make with it, because yeD not knowing their semantics and not doing much for you.
I used yED a lot at my previous job and I found it to be quite clunky in several cases, sequence diagrams above all. Also it doesn't look very slick, and learning how to properly tweak object props is not immediate. I often resorted to MS Power Point for quick and dirty diagramming. With that said, it's just good enough for a free product, though it doesn't have any special edge over some of the web-based alternatives out there. A very impressive feature IMO is automatic re-arrangment.
Typical use case, when you want to draw complex activity of class diagrams when, e.g. Following some legacy code, or just brainstorming ideas, it's easy to end up with a very tangled mess of shapes and arrows. YED has this magic button that rearranges the graph in a smart way, mostly based on direction of edges.
And suddenly your diagram looks sane again. Kudos to them for this.
Seconded, yEd is amazing. I've found it fantastic for eg UML-like class diagrams. It has a beautifully simplistic approach to UML (which is an overdesigned mess, but that doesn't mean that all class diagrams are useless): for each class, the method list and attribute list are just two multiline text fields. Compare that to other UML tools that have a 'Edit Method' dialog and whatnot.
The UX is amazing, especially once you get the hang of it and know how to circumvent its few quirks. I find that for many kinds of diagrams, drawing them in yEd is faster than on paper (the actual drawing is roughly as fast, changing my mind is an order of magnitude faster). YWorks employee here, though not working on yEd.
As shezi noted, it's a demo for the capabilities of our commercial diagramming library. Said library handles displaying and editing graphs, automatic layout and analysis algorithms and yEd showcases all of those things to some extent. The library itself is quite customizable, though, so our customers often create applications for very specific diagrams and interactions with it. I would assume, however, that the intersection between yEd users and yFiles licensees is fairly small, though. It still remains a good showcase for what developers could do with the library (along with the 100+ demo applications that ship with it 1). YEd is really great!
I stumbled upon it while googling about 7 years ago, and it was awesome even then (and it comfortably beat visio). What's even more cool is their (newish) online version, which means you can do all the diagramming in the browser and even share it conveniently. Thank you to the creators of yEd - you've put together a wonderful product! If there is one feature I would like to see, it's the ability to bulk format elements and label fonts. From what I remember, that was just a tad monotonous. YWorks employee here, though not working on yEd.
Thanks for the kind words. As for your wish, I think that's already there. You can select many items at once and change them all in the same way, e.g. Changing the label font. To select all elements of the same type, simply select one of them (e.g.
A label (you may have to use Ctrl+click to select a label on top of a node)) and press Ctrl+A. That should select all labels, while not selecting anything else. From there you can change properties for all of them at once. I think we've added this to yEd Live (the online version) as well recently.
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There is also a powerful selection dialog under Tools Select elements where you can basically select everything that matches certain criteria, such as all nodes with the same color, or predecessors of the currently selected node. Afterwards you can change properties in the panel as usual. This one only exists in the desktop version, though. For serious print work, still nothing beats Illustrator. (And I really really wish something would.) I really like gravit.io as an online lightweight version of Illustrator. For me it has been especially good for online targeted diagrams, e.g., for blog posts & web pages. For my shameless plug, I helped build a whiteboarding tool that is great for simple hand-drawn diagrams, and truly looks whiteboardy.
We intentionally kept the tools simple so you can iterate and obsess over the idea rather than the look. That might not be what you mean by “beautiful diagrams”, but personally I find a good whiteboard diagram quite beautiful.
Maybe it’s a functional beauty. We used Limnu to create all the diagrams for the online book “Ray Tracing in One Weekend.” I also worked at LucidChart for a while, and I know first-hand it’s very powerful and quite good compared to almost everything online, especially for flowcharts and serveral pre-baked styles of data driven diagrams. Recently I used plotdevice.io to build a 3d line renderer for a bunch of diagrams in a book. It’s a Mac environment that is similar to Processing, but is based on Python and has built-in PDF export. Depending on what type of diagram I need, I use one of: 1. LaTeX + TikZ - if my diagram is simple or lends itself well to the TikZ syntax, I can usually get it done quickly and have it look professional. Graphviz - if I'm drawing anything that can be represented as a directed graph, Graphiviz is fantastic due to it's automatic positioning and layout.
Ipe - for heavy lifting where neither of the above will cut it, ipe does a great job. It's basically xfig, but on steroids and with a modern UI. Here are some samples.
I've been looking off and on for the past year or two. The scene is depressing. Or there is just no market for cross-platform applications. However I doubt that is the case as over time there have been more fully-featured, once-desktop-only applications competing successfully cross-platform. Sketch for example.) Draw.io is free but requires you to do so much work yourself to create objects, size them, group them, connect them, arrange them. Most other tools I've found when googling around require the same level of effort to use as Draw.io: AsciiFlow, Gliffy.
Omnigraffle is out of the picture since I need to be able to share and use graphs across Mac, Windows, and Linux users - without needing to describe multiple tools and conversion between formats or anything. The simplest tool I've seen that just works is Visio. It is primarily click-and-drag and has great suggested connecting, sizing, grouping, and arranging features. It has an online client that works in Chrome in Mac, Linux, Windows, and FreeBSD. On Windows there is also the fully-featured desktop client. It's also familiar/intuitive enough to old-school Office users and feels like a regular graphics application to those of us less Office-oriented. I don't enjoy spending as much time as I have hunting for the ideal solution.
But I'm happy to have found Visio. As someone who went out and bought a license and used it frequently for figures in grant proposals and other documents, Visio is excruciating.
It's not even much of a learning curve, it's just frustrating and feels like you're fighting it. This is because I was using Visio where the final product needs to look aesthetically perfect, and the workflow would get you to 95%. But we all know how much manual tweaking it takes for that final 5% - getting none of the text overlapping, making sure arrow dashes don't alias with each other, making sure colors can be distinguished, moving the logical structures around to get the overall shape and flow right, and so on. That stuff is pretty good, and I've only seen worse in other tools. But it's still excruciating. Consider the case of a metabolic pathway. It's a diagram that shows different biochemicals, and they're connected to one another by arrows labeled with an enzyme.
In this situation, you often have several chemicals that can all be converted to something you want to highlight. When presenting such things in linear logical order for explanatory power you'd have all the precursors in a row and then have them all have nice arrows going to the product. What I had the most trouble with was getting the arrows to combine nicely with curves. Consider something that makes it so that when multiple arrows go to a single connection point, it replaces the arrowheads with a single composite arrowhead. This deals with slight angle issues and color mismatches. Arrow labels were relatively straightforward to get adjusted right, but arrow bodies were not. In this kind of diagram I also need to often pull a secondary arrow out of the main arrow to indicate a species that was removed, for instance ATP might come in and go out as ADP.
This is very tricky to blend right visually, the arrows will be overlapping, they're defined to touch from the center of the secondary arrow to a point on the main arrow, etc. Consider a tool to launch additional arrows (casting both forward and backwards if desired) from evenly spaced control points on a main arrow? Example of how bad it is when most people do it (this one is typical or above average). If Visio could to those right (don't worry about adding a chemical editor, those are just PNG or vector graphics from ChemDraw 100% of the time) it would make biology so much easier to present nicely. Pleeeeeeease support Mac!
I'm a technical consultant who was given a Macbook for work and I have to run a VM to use Visio. We're working on spec'ing out a replacement technology that works on Mac, but none of the competitors are as good as Visio, and all of our clients expect Visio. In 2019 we've got a team of 65 people all ditching Visio (and our Windows VMs) and going with LucidChart or Omnigraffle because we need something that runs on Mac. Also you probably don't have control over this, but I tried to add Visio to my personal Office 365 subscription for personal use, but apparently you need a business subscription to get Visio? What's the point of that? I want to give Microsoft my money but they just won't take it. Free hunter:.
The problem you encountered was an 'improvement' MS introduced in with Office 2016. They decided that Visio was a 'business' product that home users could not possibly want to use.! More likely, that home users could not AFFORD to use at the price point MS is selling Visio.
Initially, they made it impossible to install Visio (and Project) with ANY other Office bundle. It took them almost a year to fix for business users. Here are a couple of links from MS about installing Visio. SUPPORTED SCENARIOS FOR INSTALLING DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF OFFICE, VISIO, AND PROJECT ON THE SAME COMPUTER – DIFFERENT YEARS AND MSI VS CTR.
This is an EXCELLENT resource. Starting on October 11, 2016, Office 2013 software that uses Click-to-Run can be installed on the same computer with Office 2016 software that uses Click-to-Run. We can also Use the Office Deployment Tool to install volume licensed editions of Visio 2016 and Project 2016.
Note: The MAK keys currently available on the Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC) aren’t compatible with this specific installation scenario. We’re working on a solution, but we currently don’t have a date when we expect the solution to be available. KMS activation is available. Since you are on the team, puzzle me this. The original creators sold out to MS back in the mid 2000's. Now MS calls it an 'Office' product.
So why is Visio not included in ANY Office bundled offering? It is only sold as an overpriced standalone product, back to 1980's marketing! It strikes me as contrary to the key concept underlying Office! That is selling bundles of products cheaper than standalone competitors. As this question shows, there are lots of free and low cost alternatives.
Visio (and Project) should be included in at least one Office bundle, ie Pro Plus. Sorry, that is not going to happen. (my opinion as an informed user.). The Office online (onlie ) (cr)applets will NEVER have feature parity with desktop equivalents. The online applets are intended for simple use only. They can read and do simple edits on files created in the 'real' desktop applications without corrupting features they cannot edit. They are essentially a 'bait and switch' tactic.
Get you used to using the simple applet, to 'encourage' you to spend money to rent Office 365 (their preferred product). Like 'Office 2010 Starter' that came 'free' with some computers, for a short time.
It was difficult for me to articulate in the original comment and still difficult for me to articulate now.:) Give it a try yourself, Visio has free trials. If you don't see a difference then it doesn't matter! But it had to do with all of those items being very manual in Draw.io with little assistance. Whereas Visio auto-resized and offered connections and new elements very fluidly. It seemed like it was taking me 20-30 minutes to do a simple diagram on Draw.io with good layout and sizing when it took me 5 minutes to do it in Visio. Graphviz for simple diagrams that can represented with basic shapes.
PlantUML for sequence diagrams, state machines and the likes. Powerpoint/Keynote for things that are presentations - and usually I will export one of the above formats as SVG, clean it up a bit, turn into PDF and drop into the slides.
As a general rule all my diagrams must be vector based, and no bitmap objects should be embedded. Confluence with Graphviz and PlantUML plugins for placing diagrams into documentation. This also gives more granular version control. Other diagrams may also end up in source control with the product itself. Occasionally I have ASCII art embedded in source code, nearly all of this is hand cranked as I've yet to find tools that work for me. Almost always this is formatted to show up in generated documentation. But most importantly is having consistent design elements - spend time having colour palettes that are consistent, typefaces and type positioning that match, that shapes and layouts are as consistent as possible.
Having templates, colour palettes, and snippets help. Finally, understand basic colour theory, typography and layout. Looking at graphic design visual porn (Behance is a good starting point) after knowing the basic rules will hopefully give meaningful inspiration. Depend of what I have to draw.
TikZ good for nearly anything, the best results in any case, but a bit time-consuming. I use it only when I really need to draw impressive things (that happen really rarely); - Dia (Gnome) works well for various / casual / simple stuff especially because of it's variety of icons/block libraries immediately available. I use it to made quick stuff that does not really need to be 'visually impressive' and I do not have too much interest in them; - Ditaa (with org-mode) is nice for simple/quick drawings for witch pure TiKz is overkill and Dia as an external tool is overkill due to the simplicity/regularity of the drawing itself; - Matplotlib with Python or Hy can be a nice tool depending on what kind of diagram I have to produce; - Last mentioned, more as a curiosity since I discover it recently and essentially tested only for play. I find it a clunky tool sometimes, but the industry standard for those kind of diagrams in my field is Microsoft Visio. The icon database is fairly high quality, vector graphic, seems to have been done by professional graphic designers. The arrows actually have pleasant curves, it supports theming, etc.
I'm sure there are other tools, but the output quality is great. It's expensive though. I've seen some online tools that replicate the functionality and they're awfully close but have even more quirky UI issues that get in the way of getting it done. I don't want to be spending more than an hour on a nice figure for a publication, and even Visio ends up taking me three times that. To me it's less about making gorgeous diagrams and making shared collaborative diagrams.
IF other people working on or reading the document can't tweak the diagrams easily then they're not useful to me or make me do a lot of extra work. So I prefer things like Plant UML or Lucid Charts for docs / diagrams / arch stuff. I also have gotten to the point where I care more about speed / consistency / access than pretty. You can spend HOURS just tweaking color schemes on diagrams. If we're going to take the diagram to print in marketing material, sure spend that time. If I'm trying to get an idea across to others, nah, not worth it.
To me it's a parallel to the go formatter argument. Also auto-layout tools like plantuml mean I spend minutes on things insead of endlessly tweaking things. (expecting a lot of hate.) Microsoft Visio. It's as flexible as possible without sacrificing too much usability; you can create any sort of diagrams I can think of, from simple flowcharts to complex sequence diagrams or process illustrations. The main caveat is it's a commercial tool.
I have it available at work as most of my clients (to the point there's usually a preference for it). That said, on many specific cases I use other tools, like plantUML for generating more in depth sequence diagrams, and I prefer to stick to simple PowerPoint figures if I'm doing something that is very abstract - mainly because of its broad adoption; Most people will have a PowerPoint compatible tool installed at their computer and thus readily able to collaborate with me. This question seems to pop on HN every other month. I very much share the frustration- after trying every product under the sun I always end up coming back to Sketch, which is suboptimal to say the least. I tried to think what is it about Sketch (which isn't meant for diagraming) that makes it the best tool for the job, this is what i came up with: (1) it's native/fast (2) keyboard shortcuts (3) simple shapes / no 'component overload' (4) pretty results. So for fun (and profit) I decided to write my own diagraming tool, with those points in mind. It's Mac only, very much work-in-progress and built specifically to replace Sketch in my workflow.
If anyone's interested (in working on this, testing, whatever) - hit me up at my username here @ gmail. Any vector drawing tool will let you create a diagram like the example you posted.
Examples: Inkscape, Adobe Illustrator, Sketch (Mac only), Affinity Designer, Figma (browser-based with an Electron desktop client). You'll have to design and style the diagram yourself though. With a vector drawing app, there are no constraints on how the diagram could look - the appearance is entirely up to you. Dedicated diagramming programs like Omnigraffle (Mac only) and Visio (Windows only) come with predefined diagramming shapes and the ability to connect shapes with lines.
They save time and include options to customise the appearance of the diagram. However, the finished diagram may be a little less visually attractive if you rely on the default settings. A large collection of tools. The trick seems to be to find apps that're good at particular jobs, then compose the components drawn from those apps together into a scene. PowerPoint for composition. Unless whatever graphic you're making is simple enough to be produced by just 1 program, it's good to have a canvas-like program that you can assemble the components in.
For me, that's usually PowerPoint, since it can be pretty free-form. PowerPoint slides can be embedded into Word documents as active content. Equations: Word's equation editor or TeX. Other Microsoft Office products like PowerPoint and Excel have an equation editor built into them too, but those equation editors tend to be inferior to Word's.
I used to copy/paste Word-equations into PowerPoint. Mathematica's an option if you're using it anyway, though it can look kinda clunky. Graphs (excluding labels): Excel or a ray-tracer. For simple graphs, you can usually do them in Excel - just have to learn the customization options (which I think folks often overlook, getting discouraged by the non-customized versions).
For more complex graphs, sometimes it's just easiest to write your own ray-tracing scene. Matlab can be decent for some 3D surface figures, once you edit out its labels and replace them with better ones.
Labels: Word's equation editor or TeX again. While graph-creating tools can often insert labels just fine, they tend to be a bit rudimentary. So, once you make a graph, put it into PowerPoint, then insert your own axis labels and other markup by copying them from equation-editor tools.
If you want to add arrows, circle something, or anything like that, then you can use PowerPoint's shapes. Simple flow diagrams: Microsoft Visio or PowerPoint, depending on the kind. PowerPoint's probably better for the simplest things, but Visio scales better for larger diagrams. Engineering designs: Whatever CAD you made them in. For example, I used to put chemical process schematics together in AspenTech's Aspen Plus, then copy/paste them into PowerPoint for further markup. Minor tweaking: Paint, Paint.NET, etc. If you just want to tweak a graphic or something before pasting it into PowerPoint, simple image-editing tools can let you do that.
Security: Write your own script. If you have some graphic that might have hidden tracking information embedded in slight pixel alterations, then you can do stuff like: a. Round pixel RGB values to the nearest 5 (or whatever); b. Merge pixels together (like Paint would if you shrink an image); c. Save as JPEG or some other lossful format; d.
Randomly (using a CRNG) mutate pixel values by slight amounts to inject invisible noise. Complex diagrams: Ray-tracing. Honestly I love ray-tracing stuff; it feels like a brute-force solution to just about anything you could want to draw, and if you like programming, I think it's one of those projects that you really ought to do at some point just as a matter of being well-versed in computers. Overall, my big tip would be to be aware of the various tools that can do parts of the overall job well, then compose them in a general canvas-like setting like PowerPoint, and then finalize any little tweaks using an image-editor. It's probably not something most folks have to worry about.
But for the sake of example, say that you download an image to be later used in a document/presentation that'll be made publicly available. The image server might choose to encode information like retrieval time, IP address, account you're logged in with, and any other tracking info it might have through cookies in an invisible watermark. Then after you post the image as part of a document/presentation, the original source can make that connection. Ideally anyone tracking you would make the tracking mark cryptographically secure such that only they can interpret it, though there's also the possibility that they'd use some other mechanism that could reveal your personal information to anyone aware of the watermarking mechanism. Alternatively, say that the image is retrieved over an insecure line, e.g.
Through HTTP, and, say, some country (with loose notions of civil rights) wishes to track its propagation. Then they can intercept the original image, watermark it, and serve the malicious version to you. Which such a state might wish to do if you're, say, working on a technology that they're interested in. Really just a personal ray-tracing app. I coded it up in C# with an event-loop to update, and mouse-clicks emit a ray to hit-test against an object, allowing for interactivity. Then you can draw anything that you can programmatically describe to the ray-tracer. I mean, a scatter plot's axes can be drawn as cylinders while the points can be spheres, etc., which makes it simple enough to throw together from most quick ray-tracing tutorial projects.
But what's really cool is that, once you put some objects together that form graphs and such, it's trivial to merge them with other scenes. Like, I was really interested in having a 3D walk-through of a chemical processing plant, where I could insert graphs linked to real-time data, where the graphs themselves are just part of the ray-traced scene (rather than being something like a skin on an object). So then the 3D walk-through basically has pop-up data views. But for stuff like documents, I mostly just think of ray-tracing as the brute-force solution to anything that's not more easily done using another tool. I think the first time I used it for a plain graph, I was frustrated by trying to make a plot that had both surfaces and point-bubbles in it. So, I figured, hey, surfaces can just be interpolations of sample points, and the point-bubbles can just be little spheres.
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