John Goldsmith's visLog

Building a labelled dynamic connector in Visio

Connected diagrams can often get a little crowded with various dynamic connectors running between multiple nodes and so it can be useful to hide some of the connecting lines.  Of course you still need to make sense of what’s connected to what so adding labels to a connector can be helpful.  The challenge is positioning those labels in what is, by definition, a truly dynamic shape.

A 35 day calendar shape for Visio 2013

The ‘Calendar’ stencil has some great shapes like ‘Month’ and ‘Multiple Week’ for scheduling and planning.  The template and stencil are part of a solution that includes an AddOn called Time Solution (‘ts’) and this is effectively a builder to create and write to all of the day sub-shapes (not to mention the Outlook import feature).

One thing I miss, though, is an easy way to print out multiple months that clearly show the difference between one month and the next.  I care less about whether a month breaks across pages and more about being able to easily identify each one.

So, in this post I’ve built a shape that takes a start date and displays the following thirty four days…

Using Themes in Visio 2013

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. 

Multi color by value using Visio data graphics (3 of 3)

This is the third and final part of a post on how to create a Visio shape that displays multiple colours based on linked data within an Excel workbook...

Multi color by value using Visio data graphics (2 of 3)

This is the second part of a three-part post on how to create a Visio shape that displays multiple colours based on linked data within an Excel workbook...

Multi color by value using Visio data graphics (1 of 3)

A recent question on the VisioGuy forum asked how you would go about creating a Visio shape that displays multiple colours based on linked data within an Excel workbook.  I thought I’d have a look at how you might tackle this problem…

Modifying the Visio grid shape

A recent TechNet forum question asked if it was possible to change to behaviour of the Grid shape, found under ‘Charting Shapes’ stencil.  The existing shape’s size is based on the total number of columns and rows whether they are visible or not.  I thought I’d take a look at one way of changing this…

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…

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.