Visio Replacement – Dia

A few years back I used to use Visio a lot to do technical drawing, room layout, rack layouts, organization charts and a lot of other things. Visio had a lot of drawing elements and was easy to use. Microsoft bought Visio and while they do offer it as an add on to Microsoft Office it got far too expensive.

I have been needing a program for a long time now that can do various drawings. I have tried Open Office Draw but it just is not robust enough.

I do have AutoCad Lite for complex drawings however it is just too difficult to use for very simple drawing.

This week I found a Visio Replacement. It is called Dia – it comes with a lot of drawing elements and there are more available to download plus it is pretty easy to design your own elements. The part is it is Open Source and it is FREE. You can see it HERE

Here is a simple drawing that I did with Dia Speaker Layout