The fast way: in Safari or Chrome
- Save the .vsdx or .vsd attachment to your Mac (Downloads is fine).
- Open the Visio Viewer in Safari, Chrome, Edge or Firefox.
- Drag the file onto the page, or click to choose it.
A few seconds later you see every page of the drawing. Viewing is free, and there is nothing to install, so it works the same on an older Intel Mac, an Apple silicon Mac or an iPad.
Why not Parallels?
Running Windows on a Mac means a Windows license, a virtual machine app, and still a Visio subscription on top. That's worth it if you draw in Visio every day. For reading the diagrams other people send you, it isn't.
Need it in Keynote, Pages or a PDF?
The viewer can download the drawing as a PDF (every page, opens in Preview) and as PNG pictures of each page, which drop straight into Keynote, Pages, Word or an email. Downloads are $19 once for every drawing you open, with no subscription.
Other free options on a Mac
LibreOffice Draw is free for macOS and opens Visio files, including editing them. Newer Visio drawings sometimes show with black boxes or no arrows in it. Visio for the web works in Safari if your work Microsoft 365 account includes it.
Older .vsd files
Drawings saved by Visio 2010 and earlier use the binary .vsd format. They open the same way. Very old files can lose some connector lines; if a page looks wrong, email me the file and I'll look at it.