Diagramming with LucidChart
It might be easy to believe that the diagramming world is owned by OmniGraffle and Visio, but there is a whole world beyond those two. While they are both excellent applications, they’re also both hideously expensive, so if your employer isn’t purchasing a copy for you, and you are — as I am — but a lowly graduate student, it can be quite attractive to consider other options. In this vein, I am ecstatic to report back that I have nearly nothing but good things to say about LucidChart! LucidChart is an online diagramming / modelling application with a wide range of built-in templates, an easy-to-use interface (something Visio could learn from, really), and the ability to import from / export to other formats (including Visio), it’s the whole deal.
Thus far, I’ve created BPMN (Business Process Modelling Notation) diagrams and data flow diagrams, as well as basic flowcharts, and been quite happy with the outcomes. All of the shapes I needed were already there, and it’s super easy to connect boxes, change line and arrowhead types, and so on. They even use a reasonably attractive font (Liberation Sans, for the record). The reason why I’m somewhat in love with LucidChart, however, is from drawing entity-relation diagrams. ERDs are super useful to help visualise one’s database, and visualising the linkages between tables is extremely helpful when writing complex or nested queries. LucidChart’s ERD template allows you to show various levels of detail, from simply listing attributes, to fully identifying keys and attribute types in the diagram. You can easily label the links between the tables, both using crow’s foot notation on the end points, or by text annotation. Finally, sharing documents is super easy: much like sharing a GoogleDoc, you simply send an email invite set invited users’ permissions so that multiple people can work on the same document. Most delightfully, LucidChart also gives out free unlimited accounts to students! All I had to do was send off a quick email and voilà! Does it get any better?
Having touted the awesomeness, I do have two caveats: since LucidChart is an online application, you do have to be connected to the internet to work on it, which can be frustrating if you have crappy wifi / no Smartphone to tether off of. Working in a hotel where they only had wired internets on a laptop that has no ethernet port, this was mildly annoying. The other thing to note is that LucidChart isn’t as powerful as the above-mentioned stand-alone applications. Visio is a fantastic application for creating diagrams and models, and is extremely powerful. For people who use all of its intricacies, this probably isn’t going to cut it (but then, they’re probably not looking for other options). For the rest of us who need to create ERDs or DFDs or flowcharts more simply, though, I heartily recommend LucidChart (and indeed, it has been gradually spreading to my group-mates).
