I was wondering if anyone knows any alternatives from Microsoft Visio? Preferable free

There's probably not a single fully parallel alternative

Try some 2.0'ness http://www.lovelycharts.com/

http://www.osalt.com/

Dia roX0rz my soX0rz

Yeh I went looking a while back and didn't find much.

Dia is worth a look:

Dia is roughly inspired by the commercial Windows program 'Visio', though more geared towards informal diagrams for casual use. It can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams. It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a subset of SVG to draw the shape.

It can load and save diagrams to a custom XML format (gzipped by default, to save space), can export diagrams to a number of formats, including EPS, SVG, XFIG, WMF and PNG, and can print diagrams (including ones that span multiple pages).

Thanks guys Dia sounds the way to go.... just want basic flow chart diagrams :)

I tried to find this sick flowchart I did in Dia of my computer game program structure but couldn't find it (think it's backed-up on a CD). Anyway, Dia is good. GTK+, on the otherhand, not so great.

Pro-tip: CTRL+S often.

Trog did you just put this on bigpond :) http://files.bigpond.com/library/index.php?go=details&id=43272

Let's face it though, the open source stuff all sucks compared to visio goodness. Pity it's so expensive! :(

Visio is one of those MS products (or rather a product of a company they wisely bought) that's actually really good. And yeah they know it's good judging by the price the charge you for it!.

yeh we have terminal server and was hoping we could just put a copy on there so ppl could use it... but that no go :(

If you're looking for alternatives to different pieces of software (including visio), try this site. I think the alternatives for visio are pretty much what people have already list here though.

PS So far I haven't been able to find any OSS alternative that replaced or does anything closer to Visio, in particular DB entity reverse engineer charts. They all have a varying degree of suckiness. For the record, I've tried al of the ones listed here...

You can but you need to sort out the licensing and apply group policies tits

Trog did you just put this on bigpond :) http://files.bigpond.com/library/index.php?go=details&id=43272

yep, realised the old version we had there expired

I've used Dia and it's 'alright'. There really is no substitute for Visio though :(

Yay for the MSDN Academic Alliance! Sup free legit everything!