Many folks rely on organizational charts to create order in  life, and for that Dia is a cool tool. A brainchild of the Gnome Project, Dia offers a competent, noncommercial counterpart to Visio. Dia sidesteps combatting Visio diagram-to-diagram, polyline-to-polyline, however it quickly throws a chockful of the usual components-boxes, polygons, and snappy connecting lines and arrows- vital to whip up workflow diagrams, links of authority, and drawings of  circuits. For those requiring  shapes that Dia doesn’t stock, the program offers instructions on how to  customize drawings.

Sometimes, bosses can be a stickler for details and want more than the usual boilerplate templates. No fret: Dia has a few aces that can help. A particularly delightfuk feature is power to work in layers (ah! A Photshop wannabee!). You can whip up diagrams as a stack of subdiagrams, a digital visualization of  the diagrams scribbled on piles of clear acetate. These layers allow you extend your diagram into the third dimension, too: Imagine the layers as discrete blueprints for each floor of an office tower. You enjoy visualizing not just how rooms are juxtaposed  on each floor, but how the rooms are connected by wiring, HVACs, and elevators.

The program’s main ace  is Best Fit. Most diagrams  on paper or on a screen tend to run off the edges because it was too big. The Best Fit feature eliminates this problem rapidly, reducing the sprawl of diagrams to the requisite size. How about that… it’s like the program has intuition built right in!

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