Open a Visio diagram — no Visio license required
Someone sent you the network diagram, the org chart, or the floor plan — as a .vsd file. You don’t have Visio, and you’re not about to buy it: Visio isn’t included in a normal Microsoft 365 subscription, it’s a paid add-on that most offices license for one or two people at most. Drop the file here instead. It opens directly in your browser, and each page can be downloaded as an SVG (crisp and scalable, opens anywhere) or a PNG (ready to paste into an email or a slide). Everything runs locally — after a small one-time engine download it even works offline — and your diagram never leaves your computer. Network topologies and org charts are precisely the sort of thing you shouldn’t be feeding to an upload-and-hope conversion site.
About Microsoft Visio
Visio started in 1992 as an independent product from Shapeware Corporation and quickly became the standard way to draw things that aren’t quite art: network topologies, flowcharts, org charts, office floor plans, process diagrams. Microsoft acquired Visio Corporation in 2000 — one of its largest acquisitions at the time — and folded it into the Office family, but never into Office itself. Visio has always been sold separately, which is exactly why so many people are handed .vsd files they have no way to open. Files from Visio 2000 through 2010 use the binary .vsd format; Visio 2013 replaced it with .vsdx, a modern OPC package — essentially a ZIP archive of XML parts, like .docx. This tool reads both generations using libvisio, the Document Liberation Project library that also powers LibreOffice’s Visio support, covering binary .vsd from Visio 2000 onward as well as modern .vsdx and .vstx files.
Frequently asked questions
Our diagrams are confidential — where does the file go?
Nowhere. There is no server-side conversion: a small WebAssembly engine (about 1MB, fetched once) does all the work inside your browser, and the page keeps working with no internet connection at all. Infrastructure diagrams, org charts, and floor plans stay on your machine, unmodified — nothing is uploaded, logged, or stored.
Which Visio versions and file types are supported?
Binary .vsd files from Visio 2000 (version 6) through Visio 2013 open well, and so do modern .vsdx and .vstx files from Visio 2013 and later. Shapes, connectors, and text convert cleanly; a few exotic fills or embedded objects may come through simplified, and password-protected files are not supported. Multi-page documents produce one SVG and one PNG per page.
What can I do with the SVG it gives me?
Quite a lot. SVG opens in any web browser for viewing, and it’s fully editable in Inkscape (free), Figma, or Adobe Illustrator — so you can update that inherited network diagram instead of redrawing it. It also scales to any size without pixelation, which makes it ideal for printing large or dropping into documentation. For quick sharing in email or slides, use the PNG download instead.
What’s the difference between .vsd and .vsdx?
.vsd is the original binary format used by Visio 2000 through 2010 — a proprietary structure that very little software outside Visio can read. .vsdx arrived with Visio 2013 and is an OPC package: a ZIP file containing XML, the same approach as .docx and .xlsx. .vstx is the template variant of the same format. You don’t need to know which one you have — this tool detects the format from the file’s contents, not its extension, and opens both.