Visio2002: How to Build a Space Plan from a List of Office Numbers (301650)

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You can create a Visio Professional 2002 space plan to manage and allocate space and track assets, starting with as little as a list of office numbers for the portion of a building for which you are responsible.

Although the space plan diagram that you create may look basic, it functions as a powerful tool that you can use to allocate space by department, handle office moves, track computer equipment and furniture, and generate asset reports.

Creating a space plan involves three steps:

1. Prepare a list of office numbers and import it into a blank Visio Professional space plan diagram to create a collection of spaces. Locate the spaces in the Explorer, a window where you can view the information you imported by categories.
2. Drag spaces out of the Explorer onto the drawing page to build a basic space plan.
3. If you have access to a floor plan, you can insert the floor plan into a Visio Professional diagram and use it as a background on which to build your own space plan.

Prepare the Office Information and Import It into Visio

To prepare the office information from which you'll build your space plan, create a list of office numbers as a column in a Microsoft Excel worksheet. If you have other information that you want to include as part of your space plan, such as the department to which each office is allocated or the space type (cube versus office), you can add more columns to your spreadsheet.

After you type all the office numbers and other information into the spreadsheet, save it, and then import the information into Visio Professional.

Locate the Information in the Explorer

When you import your office number information into the space plan, Visio Professional translates it into spaces, creating one space for each office number. These spaces, which act like other Visio Professional shapes, are accessible through a window called the Explorer. The Explorer gives you a central location from which you can edit and arrange your space plan contents.

After you import office information and before you place it onto the drawing page, the information exists as a list of spaces by office number in the Explorer window under a category called Unplaced Data.

Drag Spaces onto the Drawing Page to Create the Space Plan

If you've imported your office information into a space plan, and you can see the information in the form of office number spaces in the Explorer window, you're ready to build a space plan.

All you need do is drag the spaces from the Explorer window onto the drawing page and arrange the space shapes so they reflect the actual arrangement of the offices on your floor.

As you drag spaces onto the drawing page, they disappear from the Unplaced Data category in the Explorer window and appear in the Page-1 category instead, indicating that this page in the diagram is where the space shapes have been placed.

Use a Floor Plan as a Background

If you have access to a paper or digital copy of a floor plan for the office space you manage, you can use it as the background on which you build your own space plan.

After you import a floor plan and set it up as a locked layer, you can build your own space plan by arranging space shapes over the top of the background.

There are two steps to preparing a floor plan that you can use as a background:

1. After you scan a printed floor plan and/or place a digital copy in an accessible location, insert it into your Visio Professional space plan diagram.
2. Lock the floor plan so that you don't accidentally move or alter it as you add space and asset shapes to the diagram.

With the floor plan locked against changes, you can build your space plan by dragging space shapes from the Explorer window and arranging them over the top of the rooms in the floor plan.