So now you know, from the previous post, that there’s no smoke and mirrors here - it’s just general formatting values being calculated in the ShapeSheet. With this knowledge I’m now going to move on and look at what happens in the ShapeSheet, when you start clicking things in the UI.
Continue reading "Visio 2013 Themes in the ShapeSheet (Part 2)" »
Having covered how to use the new Visio 2013 themes in the previous post, I’m now going to consider what’s happening from a shape developers perspective.
In this post, I’ll try and uncover how themes are structured and how they actually get surfaced in individual shapes and in the next post, I’m going to have a look at precisely what happens in the ShapeSheet when you select theme related controls in the UI.
Continue reading "Visio 2013 Themes in the ShapeSheet (Part 1)" »
One of the new features in Visio 2013 is the expanded theming capabilities that enable you to apply a uniform look and feel to shapes within a page, and across multiple documents.
There’s a new range of video-based training courses for Visio developers, available via the Office Dev Center. The course is divided into nine modules, which should take the participant from Level 100 to 300 in a day or two.
Many languages include an IsNum / IsNumeric function to check an incoming string value, however this isn’t present in Visio’s ShapeSheet function set. A recent project required this kind of check and I thought I’d jot down one way of creating a similar function in the ShapeSheet.
In the first part of this post about using bitwise functions in Visio, I looked at the theory of how these functions work. In this part I’m going to put them to work to try and build a flexible shape.
Continue reading "Using Bitwise functions in Visio (Part 2)" »
The new Visio 2013 software development kit is now available for download, and if you’ve not come across previous versions I thought I’d write a quick review of what’s inside.
The wireframing template in Visio has a treeview control to that allows you to add and remove items, and set their respective indent levels. By default you can only adjust a single item at a time and even if you create a multiple selection, only the primary item is effected. A forum question asked how you could make a single change to multiple items and I thought I would write a quick bit of code to show how you might go about it.
Continue reading "Indenting multiple tree control items in Visio" »
There was a question on the Visio forum recently on how to modify a built-in shape and I thought I jot down a quick walkthrough of how you might approach the problem. In this instance I’m going to change the way the line weight scales, but the principle of how you modify and create your own master will be the same in most cases.
The AutoConnect feature in Visio has been around for a few versions now and in 2010 it included the ability to use Quick Shapes. I think it’s a great feature and really speeds building professional looking diagrams. That said it doesn’t suit every scenario and if you find yourself in this situation then this post is about a workaround to prevent the user from turning the feature on or off at document level.
