Happy birthday to me - free shape for you

Question: What have Britt Ekland, The Moulin Rouge and this blog got in common?

Answer: They were all born today, 6th October.

While both Britt Ekland and The Moulin Rouge already have a number of birthdays under their belts this is the first for this blog.  To celebrate I thought I'd hand out a free calendar shape by way of a small thank you for reading. (Download Calendar.vsd)

Calendar shape

I'm not going to go into lots of detail about the shape, but there's a couple of interesting points that the shape demonstrates:

1) Flexible font size - The shape's text font size increases and decreases in line with the original size and this is based on a technique described by Chris Roth of Visio Guy over here: Text resizing with ShapeSheet formulas

2) Lookup and Index functions - To include the correct date suffix (ie 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc) the shape uses two very handy ShapeSheet functions to 'Lookup' the 'Index' of the date in an array of dates.  This index is then used to return the corresponding value in an array of suffixes.

 

The rest is pretty standard stuff including a couple of right-click actions where you can choose to use your own date or, the date when the shape was dropped on the page (or when the 'Use custom date' option was last toggled).

Anyway, do add a comment if you have a question about the shape, but otherwise thanks for reading.

Comments

[Chris Roth (aka: Visio Guy)]

Happy Birth;th;th;th;th;th;day...like about a month late!

Nice shape, John!

[The Process Ninja]

Hi, was wondering if there is a way to subscribe to your blog via e-mail?

[John Goldsmith]

Hi Chris,

Thanks and glad you could make it to the party!

All the best

John

[John Goldsmith]

Hello Ninja,

Alas not, unless any other Typepad members can tell me otherwise.

There are both RSS and Atom feeds if that helps?

Best regards

John

[Gary]

Love your blog! Thanks for the great articles.

Re. The Process Ninja wanting posts emailed.... it is possible (and very simple) to use Feedburner to managed email subscribing/unsubscribing and sending of posts. All one needs to do as a publisher is burn your feed at Feedburner then enable the Feedburner email service and place the Feedburner link on your website/blog. When Feedburner 'sees' a new post it emails subscribers.