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

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 – Save As Silverlight

Continuing my review of some of the new features in Visio 2010, today I’m going to look at some exciting functionality that enables you to save your diagrams out to Silverlight…

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…

Icons and Cursors

 

A few months ago I received free copies of Axialis Software’s IconWorkshop and CursorWorkshop products.  Today they contacted me to ask if I could highlight their ‘Spring Sale’, which I’m quite happy to do as I’ve found them very handy and easy to use tools. 

You might be wondering if this has any relevance for Visio, but they also have some free icon packs including .png and .gif images, which can of course be used in Visio documents as straight shapes, or in data graphics (check out this msdn article: Building Custom Data Graphics for Visio 2007).

Extending Visio’s Save As Web zoom functionality

This post is in response to a newsgroup question about how to extend Visio’s Save As Web zoom limits and also, how to set a custom default zoom level as each page loads…