Website Hype

If you enjoy writing, producing reports is a fairly straightforward thing – until you come to including diagrams which explain your ideas, give your reader an idea of equipment used, or layouts, and so on. Do you do hand drawings and scan them into your computer? For some reason I haven’t yet looked at some of the many drawing packages that are available, probably because they don’t tend to come as standard when you buy your computer – except Paint, which is useful, but probably a bit too simple in terms of what it can do. But now I have found the website Gliffy, which allows you to easily draw, and even share, diagrams online.

With Gliffy you can do flow charts, floor plans, landscape designs, technical drawings, all sorts of things. Gliffy turns your ideas into pictures. They have shape libraries and a fairly intuitive interface that helps you to create diagrams pretty quickly. The fact that the diagrams can be shared online opens up a host of possibilites for online collaboration, and no more sending large, awkward attachments to the people you are working with.

Gliffy Basic is free, and Gliffy Premium is $30 for the year, so you can try it out for a while, and then decide whether you need such refinements as more extensive libraries and email support. They even do a neat demo that gives you a good idea of what Gliffy can do, and there are forums where you can seek advice from other users.

I’m looking forward to writing my next report, as it will now have some impressive illustrations, with the help of Gliffy.