John Goldsmith's visLog

Visio 2010 – Custom context menus

You’ll have to forgive the poor menus analogy, but I get bored with the same old pictures…

Anyway, on with another new feature in Visio 2010 – Multi-level custom context menus.  The current and previous versions of Visio have allowed you to add custom menu items to the context menu of pages and shapes and if you haven’t done so yourself, you only need to right-click on some of the built-in shapes such as the ‘Flowchart shapes’ shape (in the Basic Flowchart Shapes stencil) to see them at work.  One limitation, however, has been the inability to group the menu items into any kind of hierarchy.  Basically, all menu items that you add, get placed at the top level.  Visio 2010 changes that…

Link (size) data to shapes

Just off the 2010 track for a second, this is a quick post in response to a newsgroup question about how to link size data, in a spreadsheet, to the shapes in a Visio 2007 document.  (Note that the Link data to shapes functionality is only available in Visio 2007 Professional.)

Visio 2010 – ShapeSheet Intellisense and formula editing

I’ve been getting my hands dirty with the new Technical Preview of Visio 2010 and it’s got some great new features.  In no particular order, I’m going to start off with a couple of new ShapeSheet features that have caught my eye...

Simple Visio Bullet Graph

Well, moving on from the Sparkline shape in my previous post, this time I thought I’d look at how to go about building a Bullet Graph using Visio.  To quote its inventor, Stephen Few, a Bullet Graph “is designed to display a key measure, along with a comparative measure and qualitative ranges to instantly declare if the measure is good, bad or in some other state.”

If you want more details on Bullet Graphs or dashboard design in general then I recommend you buy his book “Information Dashboard Design”.  For this post I’m going to concentrate on how to build the shape itself…

Simple Visio Sparkline implementation

 

Visio is a great tool for representing complex systems and data and the data graphics functionality in 2007 makes the communication of data even simpler than before.  The charting stencil however, while providing an array of charting shapes, doesn’t make it easy to tie actual data to respective chart and so I thought I’d have a look, over the next few posts, at some custom chart shapes that deal more directly with the underlying data.  First off is Edward Tufte’s Sparkline chart…

3 ShapeSheet Tips (Part 2 - Formula Tracing)

Continuing with my ShapeSheet Tips series (part 1, part 3), today I'm going to look at a tool that helps when trying to understand the relationships between cells within the Visio ShapeSheet - Formula Tracing...

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)

3 ShapeSheet Tips (Part 1 - Insert Function)

I recently spotted a feature in Visio's ShapeSheet window that, up to now, I'd missed.  It's the Insert Function menu option and I thought this would be rather useful, particular for anyone who's just beginning ShapeSheet development.  While I'm in the ShapeSheet area, I'll also highlight a couple of other handy tools that you may or may not have come across, namely Formula Tracing and the Style Explorer, and I'll cover these in the next two posts...

Highlighting images using a mask

A newsgroup question caught my attention recently and I thought I'd employ the above sheep to help solve the problem.  I met them on a walk with my wife on holiday in Scotland and, while they know next to nothing about Visio, they make a useful sample image for this post. 

The question - "How do you highlight part of an image in Visio"?

Whilst you can get to a number of image properties via Format / Picture... and the ShapeSheet, spot highlighting (or any other localized pixel-level manipulation) isn't one of them...

Hiding Pages

A recent question in the newsgroups made me think about how you could hide pages using just the ShapeSheet.  The answer to hiding pages is usually a programmatic one, often for good reasons, however I thought I'd have a go at a ShapeSheet only approach as an alternative...