When you open Microsoft Office Visio 2003, you are prompted to choose the Drawing Type. Click on Charts and Graphs and choose one of the templates you need. 

Figure 1 Choose the Charts and Graphs templates


Let’s start with an example based on a pie chart (these are used for expressing percentages). The base information for our chart is the percentages each browser was used by our site’s users (up to date on April 13, 2007, and for April only).

So here are the base values. 

Browser	Percentage
IE 7	20.54%
IE 6	44.08%
IE 5	22.37%
FF	10.71%
MOZ	0.61%
N8	0.03%
09	1.66%
Total	100.00%

Now click on the Pie Chart (Metric) and you are faced with a lot of tools and a blank sheet of paper. From the Shapes TaskPane, click on the PieChart and drag it on the work surface. 

Figure 2 Click and drag the pie chart

As soon as it’s on the work surface you’ll be asked how many “slices” you need. Choose 7 (look in the table above) and click OK. Now you should see that the size of slices is equal. We have to enter our values.

To do that, right click the chart and select Set Slice Size. 

Figure 3 Click to enter the size for each slice

In the dialog box which opens, enter the values from the table we did at the beginning of the tutorial and click OK. Our chart now looks as it should…or does it? 

Figure 4 Chart

If you right click anywhere on the pie chart, you’ll see that a number of items can be edited. You can choose to format the text and the fill. I think our chart is fine enough so let’s save it.

Click the Save button and look in the Save as Type drop down dialog box. By default, Visio 2003 saves it as Drawing, which means that you can open the file anytime in Visio 2003 and edit it. But I want to insert it in a Word 2003 document, so I’ll save it as GIF (Graphics Interchange Format). Enter a name, choose a location and save it. Now we have a chart that can be inserted in any document or used in Photoshop.