Suggestions on how best to visually represent Data Flow?

• YSLGuru

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  March 31, 2009 at 4:28 pm

  #130368

  Anyone have any suggestions on how to visually display the flow of data in 2 or more tables of a SQL Server DB with any of the existing Office Products or one of thier many tools?

  We have all of the various Office 2003 & 2007 products including Viso and I've been trying to figure out which to use and how best to use that tool to draw a diagram showing the path taken by Data UPDATES/INSERTS/DELETES in the database when a particular action is done in the front end of the web based app that uses the SQL DB.

  This is a third-party software app that we can't simply do whatever we want to customize how it works and so we often come up with alternatives. For example if one of the monitoring reports in the app does not meet our needs we generate a custom view after using Profiler to trace what all is touched in teh back end by the app when a user performs some action within the application.

  Right now there are about a half dozen tables involved in the applicatiosn custom reporting process and what I'd like to do is put together a visual representation of the flow of data/actions taken based on choices the user makes when running a report in this application. I'm not that familiar with Visio and using the provided templates/walk-thrus has proven less intuitive then I thought they would.

  I could draw this out in Adobe/Corel Draw but I would think that somewhere within Office ther has to be a way to more easily create this graph/flow chart.

  Suggestions?

  Thanks

  Kindest Regards,

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