I am considering installing BeGraphic. I have Office 2010 and Windows 7, both enterprise editions. My main interest isn't for maps, but instead for visualizing data from Access or Excel spreadsheets, tables and other forms of data and displays in graphs, charts, scorecards or other visualizations. Is BeGraphic mostly a map information tool and geographic information display tool? That is what I gather from the Forum. My specific need is for displaying data from an Access or mysql data base or from Excel for network security purposes. Again mostly csv data, tables or spreadsheet data.

Do I have the right tool?

What a global question

Charts are made of circles, rectangles, lines and dots.

BeGraphic is adding new types of information inside any shape (e.g.: maps, needle, triangle...) by making every detail meaningful:
* moving the angle (then the needle becomes a gauge)
* changing the color (then the country's shape becomes a choropleth map)
* adding a pattern, border... (then each freeform becomes multidimensional by showing several indicators)
* changing the height and/or the width...

To use BeGraphic: You can extract data from anywhere you want (Access, MySQL...); but you have to put them into Excel. This is the only rule!

To do a smart "Network Security" process diagram, design it in Excel (Excel can do as good as Visio)... And then use BeGraphic to make your shapes becoming alive (data-driven) in a much more powerful way than Visio.

Thanks. That was a brief, to the point and informative reply. I plan to install and try out BeGraphic lite.

You are welcome !

As you now understand, the only things you need is to have time and imagination.

That is why some people will prefer to buy the coming "Edition Pro."
(in order to get ready-to-use templates).

Great post