How To Open Visio Files in Linux

1. Overview

Microsoft Visio files are popular for creating diagrams, charts, process workflows, and network maps. These include several file extensions, such as .vsd, .vdx, .vtx, and .vsdx.

In this tutorial, we’ll discuss two ways to open Visio files in Linux: LibreOffice Draw and File Conversion using unoconv.

2. Using LibreOffice Draw

LibreOffice Draw is a vector graphics editor tool in Linux that’s part of the LibreOffice suite. Simply put, it supports .vsd, .vdx, .vtx, and .vsdx extensions, so we can open Visio files directly in LibreOffice Draw and view them there.

$ libreoffice --draw

It’ll start us off with a blank canvas:

We can select File > Open and then choose a Visio file to view, like this one called Sample.vsd:

3. File Conversion using unoconv

We can also convert Visio files to another file format more suitable for our needs. For example, we can convert Visio files to Portable Document Format (PDF) files. Since PDF is a popular file format, this likely increases its reach, making it a good candidate to convert to.

So, let’s convert the Visio file to PDF format. To do this, we’ll use the unoconv tool. It’s a powerful Linux command-line tool that converts files in different formats.

Interestingly, unoconv is a Python wrapper that uses the LibreOffice suite for opening and converting files.

3.1. Installation

Let’s install unoconv in our system.

First, we install the unoconv tool in Debian-based systems from the Linux terminal using the apt command:

$ sudo apt install libreoffice unoconv

In the case of Arch and Arch-derivatives, we utilize the pacman command to install unoconv:

$ sudo pacman -S unoconv libreoffice-fresh

After installation, we can check the version to verify the installation status of the tool:

$ unoconv --version
unoconv 0.7
Written by Dag Wieers <[email protected]>
Homepage at http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/unoconv/
platform posix/linux
python 3.12.3 (main, Feb  4 2025, 14:48:35) [GCC 13.3.0]
LibreOffice 24.2.7.2

After completing the installation process, we’ll proceed with the file conversion step.

3.2. Usage

First, we navigate to the directory where the Visio file is stored, say /home/username/Downloads. Once in the correct directory, we can perform the conversion:

$ unoconv -f pdf Sample.vsd

The -f option indicates the output format, in this case pdf. The result is we have a file called Sample.pdf in our working directory.

After converting the Visio file to PDF format, we can open it using popular Linux-compatible tools like Evince, MuPDF, QPDF, and Okular.

5. Conclusion

In this article, we explored three different ways to open Visio files in Linux.

The most straightforward approach is to use LibreOffice Draw, which comes preinstalled in most of the desktop-oriented Linux distros. Alternatively, we can convert the Visio files to some Linux-compatible formats, such as PDF, to open them easily in Linux.