
This post is inspired by a recent one by Saveen Reddy on creating a bitmap color wheel image. Saveen’s post demonstrates some C# code to generate a png image pixel by pixel. I thought this might make a handy shape in Visio when you want manipulate colors without opening the modal format dialogs within Visio itself.
Continue reading "Creating a color picker in Visio" »

There was a recent question in the TechNet forum asking how you could have multiple instances of a shape that have both local (specific to each instance) and global (shared) fields. I thought I’d take a quick look at how you might achieve that.
Continue reading "Shapes with global values" »

When building custom shapes in Visio, you can often find yourself having to construct complex formulae that follow a repeatable pattern. There are a number of ways of attacking this problem that range from writing each formula one at a time through to generating the formula strings in code…
Continue reading "Using Excel to build Visio ShapeSheet formulae" »

A few weeks ago I was introduced to the jQuery Mobile framework at a UK Bing Maps User Group meeting. It looks like a cracking tool for cross browser mobile work and I’m looking forward to using in future projects.
Being a keen Visio man I thought I’d have a go at putting together some shapes for wireframing and mock ups. The following are the results…
Continue reading "Visio shapes for jQuery Mobile" »

I’ve recently been transferring some old VBA ShapeSheet utilities over to a c# add-in for Visio 2010 and hit a problem when trying to add some custom groups to the ShapeSheet Design ribbon tab. Using Ribbon.xml, I was happily able to add groups to either custom tabs or built-in ones such as ‘Home’, but for love nor money couldn’t get anything to show in the ShapeSheet tab.
Chris Hopkins, from the Visio team, kindly set me straight and the solution was in understanding that not all tabs are created equal and that the ShapeSheet Design tab belongs to a set called Contextual Tabs…
Continue reading "Customising Contextual Ribbon Tabs In Visio 2010" »

When you insert an image into Visio, the default behaviour is to add it to a containing shape with the full width and height of the image being visible. If you delve into the ShapeSheet, however, you can expand the image outside of containing shape’s bounds, with the extended area being hidden from view. Visio actually makes use of this in some of its Data Graphics functionality by having an icon strip and moving this left and right depending on which part of the image is required.
Of course you could extend this image shifting to two dimensions and then use a grid based approach in order to address each cell and that’s what I’m going to cover in this post…
Continue reading "Image grids in Visio" »

Drawing early stage wireframes can often involve sketching out a series of rectangular areas to create a desired structure. Graph paper can feel a little too structured but dot grid paper is a great alternative. I recently came across a very smart notepad from Behance and of course, as this isn’t a new idea, there’s lots of free pdf downloads such as the ones at McGraw Hill. If you want to create your own, however, then Visio can also help…
Continue reading "Dot grid backgrounds" »

When you select a particular font in a Visio document, what you are really doing is adding a reference to a font that’s resident on your system. What you don’t always know is that anyone else who opens your document will have the same font on their system and therefore that they will see the document as you intended…
Continue reading "How fonts travel in Visio" »