John Goldsmith's visLog

Creating a color picker in Visio

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.

Shapes with global values

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.

Using Excel to build Visio ShapeSheet formulae

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…

Visio shapes for jQuery Mobile

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…

Customising Contextual Ribbon Tabs In Visio 2010

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…

New book Using Visio 2010

Congratulations to Chris Roth (aka Visio Guy) who’s just finished a new book on, as the title describes, Using Visio 2010.

I haven’t got my hands on a paper copy yet, as Chris has, but I have had a look at the table of contents and sample chapters available over at the publisher’s site and it looks a pretty comprehensive read. I say read, but there’s also several hours of video and online material to accompany the book.

In the unlikely event that you read this blog and not VisGuy.com then you might not know that Chris is a long time Visio expert (even reaching back into the pre-Microsoft days). It’s no surprise then that his book gives you not just the ‘how’ but also the ‘why’ and ‘when’ to use a specific part of the Visio functionality.

I’m looking forward to buying my physical copy and I’d certainly recommend it to anyone wanting to become more productive in using this great visual tool.

New Visio book, training videos and Business Model template

Spotted a few links I thought I’d highlight today:

• MVP Scott Helmers has a new book out – Microsoft Visio 2010 Step by Step.  I haven’t read it yet, but by the look of the table of contents it looks like a great resource on how to get the most out of Visio 2010.  The ebook is available now and I believe the print version is due early May.
• Also on the learning theme, Visio expert David Edson has a new video training series (Visio 2010 Essential Training) available at Lynda.com.  Again it’s a great resource and I notice there’s three free videos to give you a taster of what’s included. 
• Finally, I spotted this business model template from Diderik Vanwingerden, which I found appealing – demonstrates what a great collaborative tool Visio is.

Image grids in Visio

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…

Dot grid backgrounds

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…

How fonts travel in Visio

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…