John Goldsmith's visLog

Save As Web URL Parameters

Ok, hands up – I’ve only recently realised that the URL parameters functionality in Visio Save As Web output work on straight .html pages and not just server based platforms such as ASP.NET. 

I’d tried this some time ago on a local machine (using the file:// URL schema) and had assumed, incorrectly, that as URL parameters weren’t recognised that this would be the same when hosted (via http://).  This is not the case and so I thought I’d try and set the record straight by reviewing how to use this handy part of the Save As Web addon…

Visio, Excel and late binding enumerations

Excel MVP, Mike Alexander, has an interesting video over at DailyDoseOfExcel.com  The video covers how application-specific enumerations aren’t recognized when using late binding.

His answer to the problem is to use a list of ‘manual’ enumerations, which he includes as a download on the above post. 

I emailed Mike earlier today and he very kindly ran his magic code over the Visio help files to produce this set of Visio enumerations.  Perfect if you’re writing code from the other direction.

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…

Changing page size for all pages

A newsgroup poster has asked how to change the page size for all pages in a document in one go.  Although there’s no way of doing this through the UI, a code based answer to the problem is fairly straight forward and I think makes a nice simple first try at VBA for anyone that hasn’t had a go…

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:

Visio and Bing (Virtual Earth)

I've recently been involved in a WPF based project that utilises Microsoft Virtual Earth and I thought it would make an interesting exercise to combine this with Visio's Save As Web output.

I've uploaded a live demo over here that shows how clicking a shape, containing a latitude and longitude string, can update a Virtual Earth map embedded in the toolbar panel on the left hand side.

I'm not going to go into lots of detail about how to use Virtual Earth as the main purpose of this post is to demonstrate how to connect it to Visio web output, but if you want to find out more then here are a few links to get you going:

• Live Services - Microsoft Virtual Earth
• Virtual Earth Interactive SDK
• MSDN - Virtual Earth Map Control SDK 6.2

Changing the 'Save as Web' tooltip

A recent question in the newsgroups has set me looking at the way in which Visio's Save as Web addon handles hyperlink tooltips.

The original poster pointed out that in the 2002 version a hyperlink's description text was displayed as the user 'moused-over' a given shape, but that in 2003 and 2007 version the tooltip displays a standard message ('Click to follow hyperlink.') irrespective of the underlying link...

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...

'Save as web' tab navigation with jQuery - Part 2

In the first part of this post I looked at a jQuery based approach for adding tab navigation to Visio's Save as web output and the steps required to implement this.  In this post I'm going to go into a little more detail about what the code we added is actually doing.