Scott,
I work with a broadcast design consultant that uses Visio for furniture layouts. I haven’t used it myself (even though I do have the program) but I have worked on files he has exported to AutoCAD format for me. They convert well, but not perfectly. Maybe it’s the way he uses Visio but everything is a block. When you explode the block to try and manipulate it a whole list of attributes appears that you must delete and the block lines explode to polylines. Very annoying. Also, text formatting and fonts are lost. You have to recreate them. In other words, files exported from Visio take some modifying to make them useable for modification in CAD. But it does work. When converting CAD files to Visio, there are a few problems. If the last save of the.dwg file was in paper space, any text outside of the view port will be converted to lines instead of Visio shapes and is un editable. OH, yes it does use layers. All layers show up in the layer manager as white but individual blocks are overridden in different colors. Files I have received that were exported from Microstation were set up the same way. Visio can add comments and Visio shapes to CAD drawings without ever doing a .dwg/.vsd conversion. That’s a +! Plots I have seen looked great. It is a Microsoft Office program so I would think it can do VBA/Macros but I don’t think it makes use of xrefs. LISP routines I will have to do some checking on. Not sure if it is capable. Anyway, I think I will stay with AutoCAD. To many long hours learning how to use it to give up now!
