Introduction to Gliffy:

Gliffy is a service that helps you to create and share diagrams, flowcharts and more. Using this service, you are able to create diagrams and share them with friends or with the public, in general. Gliffy is not simply a drawing tool, but has a wide range of tools and necessary items for creating professional flowcharts for presentation purposes.

Interface:

Gliffy runs completely on your web browser. It uses the Adobe Flash Player for all operations and hence you need it to run the site. The main site has a neat, simple and informative interface and thus makes it very easy to find what you are looking for.The site runs pretty fast even on a moderately paced internet connection, such as mine.

Signing Up:

Gliffy can be used free of charge for upto five diagrams which can be saved and edited whenever you want to. You need an email to signup in case you are interested in sharing the diagrams. Otherwise, you can simply try the service without submitting any data about yourself. The professional version costs upto $50 for a year. However, the free version has immense features as well.

Features:

There are quite a lot of features in Gliffy to discuss about, but I’ll outline a few important ones here.

Creating and Saving:

You are able to create upto 5 different diagrams for every free account at gliffy. You can create, delete, rename and save files. You can export the diagrams as .svg, .jpeg or .png directly from gliffy.

Editing:

All the usual operations like cut, paste, copy, delete, undo etc can be done from the main menu itself just as in another editing program.

Sharing:

Once you are done creating your diagram, you are able to publish the diagram on a blog or collaborate it with other people. For collaborating, you need to provide the email addresses of those persons to enable them to see your work. By default, all diagrams are public. You can create private diagrams only in the paid version. This is a serious disadvantage as I am unable to even try out the paid feature.

Diagram Tools:

There are a large number of diagrams that can be used to create a wide range of presentations. Images for flowcharts, UML, Entity Relationship, Floorplan, Network are available in plenty for you to use in your diagrams.

Other Features:

You are able to resize the page, change the color, display grids and insert page breaks. You can upload images to use in your diagrams (upto 2 Mib). Also, you can search for images using Yahoo! and then insert them. There are tools for inserting text, drawing connecting lines, ellipses, rectangles and lines. You can move images to the back or front depending on your needs. You can also zoom in and out of your diagram.

 

Conclusion:

On the whole, I find this to be a very useful tool. I am confident that anybody who wishes to use diagrams in presentations can give this a shot as the diagrams made look very professional even when made by amateurs. There are a number of examples to demonstrate the power of this tool. Also, look at other opinions about gliffy and its service to know more about the service. This seems a very powerful challenger to Microsoft Visio and its capabilities are only limited by your creativity.

Please do leave your comments about the service and if you would find it useful sometime. Thanks for reading!

Keep up to date

Want to know the latest? Subscribe to our RSS or get Regular Email Updates.

Share the Post

        

Related Posts

Post-Plugin Library missing