John Goldsmith's visLog

Using Visio hyperlinks

I thought I’d take a quick break from looking at the new features in Visio 2010 and turn to a topic that pops up fairly regularly in newsgroups – Hyperlinks...

Using Office 2010 Background Removal with Visio

I spotted a blog post the other day about a new feature in Office 2010 that enables you to ‘crop’ a subject out of an image.  The feature is called Background Removal and is part of Excel, PowerPoint and Word 2010:

• The magic of background removal – Office 2010 Engineering

The need for this type of functionality crops up in Visio from time to time and both Chris Roth and I have come up with mask workarounds for this in past:

• Super Mask Visio Clipping Shape – VisGuy.com
• Highlighting images using a mask - visLog

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…

Save As Web and IE8

I came across an issue recently with Visio’s Save As Web output and IE8.  Basically a JavaScript function, which had worked quite happily in IE6 and 7, now throws an error as the main page loads.

I believe this issue will be addressed in the next Office 2007 SP2, coming soon, but until then and for any legacy sites there’s a fairly quick fix…

New Visio Webcast Series

 

I’ve just received details of a new Visio webcast series, named Let us show you how!, which is going to be running over the next six weeks.  First one is this afternoon (depending on where you are of course).  Details are copied below:

Convert Excel, PowerPoint & Word flowcharts to Visio

Just spotted a new Visio addin over at the Microsoft Visio ToolBox that converts flowcharts created in Excel, PowerPoint or Word to Visio based flowcharts...

Visio Extras Add-Ons, a version comparison

This is just a quick post in response to a mistake I made to a newsgroup question about add-ons that ship with Visio and to remind myself for the future.

The question was how do you go about numbering shapes in Visio, to which Paul Herber of Sandrila answered correctly that you can use the Number Shapes add-on under Tools / Add-Ons / Visio Extras / Number Shapes...

Taming your toolbars

This post is in response to a few newsgroup questions recently, about disappearing Visio toolbars.  Although I'm not going to offer a definitive fix for these occasional problems I thought I'd share a tip on how to recover your customized toolbars when things do go awry...