This article is written intended to guide you how to Install Microsoft Visio Mac / MacBook Pro / MacBook Air running OS X El Capitan.
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One program that missing when using MacBook is there is no Microsoft Visio for Mac. Although Microsoft has been officially releasing Microsoft Office (e.g Word, Excel, PowerPoint) for Mac, Microsoft still does not release Visio for Mac, at least until now.
Since I work as a network administrator, Microsoft Visio is very important for me to draw network diagram / topology. Although there are many Visio alternatives for Mac such ConceptDraw, LucidChart, SmartDraw, or OmniGraffle according to my opinion they can not replace Visio. It is the best because of its simplicity and easy to use. Another reason is I am already familiar with Visio when running Windows and also already bought the software license so buying another program for this purpose is wasting money.
In this article I will not talk about which software is better. I want to show you how to install Microsoft Visio on Mac running OS X El Capitan on top of Wine, thanks to WineHQ team for making this great tool. It should be applicable on previous version of OS X such as OS X Yosemite, OS X Mavericks, and Mac OS X Mountain Lion.
Lets start with the installation process
Windows programs can be run on OS X, Linux and BSD via WINE (Windows Emulator) so first we need to install wine and winetricks.
We can install wine and winetricks packages using Homebrew, follow this post how to install Wine on OS X.
Define Visio Home directory
Although it is not necessary, it is better to set environment folder for Visio. We will set it under $HOME/.vision2007. Inside your $HOME directory (/Users/your_username), create .visio2007 directory.
Perform Wine initialisation and setup of WINEPREFIX in .visio2007
We need several packages be installed to run Visio 2007. Those packages are gdiplus, msxml6, dotnet20, riched20, and corefonts. Install them using winetricks as follows:
Capture example of installing .Net Framework (dotnet20) is as in image below:
After installing the packages above, then run Wine configuration editor (winecfg)
In Wine configuration, under Libraries tab make sure that gdiplus, msxml6, riched20 are set to native. See image below!
Run Visio setup installation
Once the above dependency packages installed and configured, we are ready to run the installation.
After the installation completed and successful, you can run Visio using command below:
Visio should be running well without any problem.
Create visio script
To make it easier to run Visio using Terminal, create a script named as ‘visio’.
Copy and paste the following command into the visio script. Change the ‘your-username’ accordingly with yours.
Make it executable and then move it into $PATH
To run Visio, just type visio in Terminal.
Mac users aren’t at all shy about making their requests for applications known:
How about Visio for Mac?
When will IE return to Mac?
Will we ever see a Microsoft Project for Mac?
Where can I get Access for Mac?
When will (insert name of hot new game here) be available for Mac?
Most of these requests are for well-known Microsoft applications on Windows, and Mac users want them. Let me address a few of these in some detail.
Microsoft Visio
It’s unwise to say “never” with regard to future development efforts by a company as large as Microsoft, so I will predict this about Visio for Mac: it’s very, very unlikely to ever happen.
I, and many others, believe the development costs to produce a Mac Visio that would faithfully render any existing Visio drawing (and have almost all the functionality of Visio for Windows) would never be recouped by Microsoft.
For any Mac software company, a software product that brought in $50 million per year would be viewed as a fantastic success. But in the rarified world of the Microsoft Office team, such a product would be considered a dismal failure.
For any Mac software company, a software product that brought in $50 million per year would be viewed as a fantastic success. But in the rarified world of the Microsoft Office team, such a product would be considered a dismal failure.
Microsoft Access
Visio For Mac Download
Exactly the same as Visio: very, very unlikely to ever happen, and for exactly the same reason.
Internet Explorer
Never going to happen.
There was a version of IE for Mac about 15 years ago. Microsoft ceased development of IE for Mac in July 2003. Given that there is no new development for IE for Windows (because of the release of Microsoft Edge in 2015), there is no chance at all for a future release of IE for Mac.
Any Hot New Game by Microsoft
Never going to happen.
The graphics foundations on Mac and Windows diverge sufficiently that porting any hot new Windows game over to the Mac is a major undertaking. It would be unlikely to recoup development costs, for the same reasons as the Office applications. You can read more details about DirectX and OpenGL.
What’s a Mac User to Do?
There are a couple of options for a Mac user:
- Use a viewer application. In some cases, a viewer application that faithfully renders a document that you could not otherwise open will suffice. In the case of Visio, Microsoft has released a Visio Viewer for iOS, as shown in Figure 1.
- Use a competing application. Search for “Visio for Mac” on Google, and many of the results will be for third-party applications for Mac that open Visio drawings and provide much of the same functionality.
- Run the real Windows application on your Mac. If you need the real Visio with all its functionality, then use Parallels Desktop® for Mac to run Windows 10 on your Mac and purchase Visio from Microsoft. You lose no functionality or visual fidelity, since you are running the real Visio in the environment it expects: Windows 10.
(Already own Visio? No problem. Just use the Migration feature in Parallels Desktop to move everything on your PC—including Visio—into a virtual machine on your Mac.)
Figure 2 shows Visio running on my MacBook Pro®.
Figure 2_Visio 2016 running in Windows10 on a Mac with Parallels Desktop
Figures 3 and 4 show Access, and Figure 5 shows IE—all running on my MacBook Pro.
Figure 3_Access 2016 in Windows 10 running on a Mac with Parallels Desktop
Figure 4_Access 2016 in Windows 10 running on a Mac with Parallels Desktop
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Figure 5_IE in Windows10 running on a Mac with Parallels Desktop
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While you may not be able to get the Mac applications you desire, you can get the Windows versions and run them right alongside your Mac applications.
As the product manager for Parallels Desktop, you might consider my opinions to be a bit biased. (They aren’t, but you might think that.) So, here is a quote from a Network World review (emphasis mine):
“I’ve been a Mac user for many years, and like with most Mac users, there are occasions when I have core business apps that require me to run Internet Explorer for a browser, or run Visual Studio for app development work, or even run Microsoft Project and Visio that just aren’t available on a Mac. And while Apple provides BootCamp where I can switch between booting from a Mac to booting as a Windows system, that means I have to constantly reboot my system to switch between operating platforms. So I’ve been a happy user of Parallels for years where I can run Windows and Mac applications side by side at the same time.” –Rand Morimoto, Network World
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