How to Create an ER Diagram in Visio

Edraw Content Team

Do You Want to Make Your ER Diagram?

Most system development engineers often wonder how they can access Visio ER diagram or how they can easily create an ER diagram. Check out the this elaborate guide to understanding how to create an ER diagram in Visio and an easier way.

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As a system development engineer, you often come across a term called Entity Relationship Diagram and how to easily make an Entity Relationship diagram. What is an ER diagram? An Entity Relationship Diagram, commonly known as ERD or entity-relationship model, is a graphical illustration that helps identify the relationships among people, places, concepts, objects, and more within an information technology-related system. Such Visio ER Diagrams are important for modeling the data stored in any system's database. In general words, by creating an entity-relationship diagram in Visio and other formats, a system engineer ensures that their real-time database will have no potential errors. Such ER Diagrams illustrate what data an engineer will store, including different entities and their attributes.

In this guide to creating ER Diagram in Visio and other formats, we will walk you through the steps you need to take to create an entity-relationship diagram in Visio and how EdrawMax and its templates are considered the best alternative to create and edit Visio ER Diagrams.

Create a Cisco network diagram in Visio

1. How to Create an ER Diagram in Visio

Follow these simple steps to create an ER diagram in Visio.

Open Visio:

As a diagramming tool, Visio has the option to create Entity-relationship diagrams using its library. A clear idea should be there about how to create an ER diagram and the functions of Visio to create a perfect ER diagram without any mistakes. To draw your ER diagram, you need to open the Visio on your system and go to the Visio dashboard, where you can create a new image. You may select a matric system or database modeling, or ER diagram from here, depending on your project.

Create an ER diagram in Visio

Create and Customize Entities:

You can create entities on a new canvas using the drag and drop feature of the tool. To select the cardinality type and relationships, you should go to the Database Document options and choose the one you want to use. You can drag an entity on the main canvas with a click on the Entity option. You can carry out entity customization and add multiple entities on the ER diagram similarly.

Create an ER diagram in Visio

Making Relationships and Attributes:

Once you have added the entities in your ER diagram, you should add the relationships and attributes. Connect the entities to add a relationship. Select from the relationship options present in the sidebar. Go to its properties for choosing a cardinality type after connecting the entities. In this way, you can add the attributes of the entities, primary keys, and foreign keys to your ER diagram.

Create an ER diagram in Visio

Save the ER Diagram:

After you have finished adding the relationships of the entities and other vital parameters, you can save your ER diagram. You need to go to the Save option of Visio and click on "Save As" for that. You can save the file and export it to the file format of your choice. As you saw here, creating an ER Diagram in Visio requires effort. Instead of using MS Visio, you can start creating ER diagrams in Visio format using EdrawMax or EdrawMax Online. These tools offer so much more than what Visio has to offer, and these are compatible with all the different operating systems.

Create an ER diagram in Visio

How to Create an ER Diagram in Visio:

Open Visio;
Create and Customize Entities;
Making Relationships and Attributes;
Save the ER Diagram;

2. How to Create an ER Diagram in EdrawMax

As you saw from the above-mentioned steps, you can create an ER diagram in Visio, but it will take an enormous amount of time and effort. Instead of going through the complicated steps of understanding how to create an ER diagram, you can check out EdrawMax steps, where we help you create a similar-looking ER diagram in five steps.

Step1 Open EdrawMax & Login

The very first step that you need to follow is to install EdrawMax in your system. Go to EdrawMax Download and download the ER diagram maker software depending upon your operating system. If you need remote collaboration with your office team, head to EdrawMax Online and log in using your registered email address.