Basic Flowchart Symbols and Meaning

Flowcharts are the best for visually representation the business processes and the flow of a custom-order process through various departments within an organization. ConceptDraw DIAGRAM diagramming and vector drawing software extended with Flowcharts solution offers the full set of predesigned basic flowchart symbols which are gathered at two libraries: Flowchart and Flowcharts Rapid Draw. Among them are: process, terminator, decision, data, document, display, manual loop, and many other specific symbols. The meaning for each symbol offered by ConceptDraw gives the presentation about their proposed use in professional Flowcharts for business and technical processes, software algorithms, well-developed structures of web sites, Workflow diagrams, Process flow diagram and correlation in developing on-line instructional projects or business process system. Use of ready flow chart symbols in diagrams is incredibly useful - you need simply drag desired from the libraries to your document and arrange them in required order. There are a few serious alternatives to Visio for Mac, one of them is ConceptDraw DIAGRAM. It is one of the main contender with the most similar features and capabilities.

How to Build a Flowchart

The ConceptDraw DIAGRAM is a professional software for quick creating great looking flowcharts. The vector stencils from object libraries allows you to use RapidDraw technology. By the clicking on direction arrows one can add new object to flowcharts. This technology gives to users the ability to fast creating visualization for the structural data. Learn the basics of flowcharting and see how to build create a flowchart using ConceptDraw automatic drawing tools.

Types of Flowcharts

A Flowchart is a graphical representation of process, algorithm, workflow or step-by-step solution of the problem. It shows the steps as boxes of various kinds and connects them by arrows in a defined order depicting a flow. There are twelve main Flowchart types: Basic Flowchart, Business Process Modeling Diagram (BPMN), Cross Functional Flowchart, Data Flow Diagram (DFD), IDEF (Integrated DEFinition) Flowchart, Event-driven Process Chain (EPC) Diagram, Influence Diagram (ID), Swimlane Flowchart, Process Flow Diagram (PFD), Specification and Description Language (SDL) Diagram, Value Stream Mapping, Workflow Diagram. Using the Flowcharts solution from the Diagrams area of ConceptDraw Solution Park you can easy and quickly design a Flowchart of any of these types. This solution offers a lot of special predesigned vector symbols for each of these widely used notations. They will make the drawing process of Flowcharts much easier than ever. Pay also attention for the included collection of ready Flowchart examples, samples and quick-start templates. This is business process improvement tools. If you are looking for MS Visio for your Mac, then you are out of luck, because it hasn't been released yet. However, you can use Visio alternatives that can successfully replace its functions. ConceptDraw DIAGRAM is an alternative to MS Visio for Mac that provides powerful features and intuitive user interface for the same.

UML Notation

Unified Modeling Language (UML) is an open standard, the language of graphic description used for modeling objects in a field of software development and software engineering. It was created for definition, specification, visualization, designing and documenting software systems, as a unification of three object-oriented technologies Booch, OMT and OOSE, and uses the defined graphic notation for creating the visual models of object-oriented software systems. Description of UML consists of two parts, interactive and supplementing each other: UML semantics, which represents a certain metamodel, defines the abstract syntax and semantics of terms of object modeling with UML, and UML notation that is a graphic notation for visual representation of UML semantics. The powerful tools of the Rapid UML solution included to ConceptDraw Solution Park make the ConceptDraw DIAGRAM diagramming and vector drawing software the best for easy applying the UML notation when creating the visual models of object-oriented software systems and designing different kinds of UML diagrams.