John Goldsmith's visLog

'Save as web' tab navigation with jQuery - Part 1

A recent newsgroup question asked whether it would be possible to add tab style navigation to Visio's Save As Web Page output.  There are a number of ways you might tackle this and here is a JavaScript based approach and more specifically, one that uses JQuery. 

You can see a live example here, but note that this is an Internet Explorer solution as only IE supports VML, (the vector based image format that Visio generates). 

I'll split this into two posts.  The first will look at how to create the functionality and the second, if you're interested, will focus on what the code is actually doing.

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...

Editing the Save As Web details table

Spotted another Save As Web question today that I thought I'd have a go at.  The question basically asks how you can edit some of the default values in the web page's details table...

Changing a Save As Web cursor

I don't know what it is about Visio's Save As Web Page function that I find intriguing, but every time I spot a question about it I feel bound to dive in and take a look.  The most recent question in the newsgroups asks how to change the mouse cursor when the user hovers over a shape with a hyperlink.

Although there's no way to change the this type of behaviour through the UI, there's a fairly easy fix if you're prepared to do a bit of post-publish text editing...

Using the Visio Event Monitor tool

 

 

When I began to think about the previous post, (on automating the insertion of images into an Org Chart), I started by running the Visio Event Monitor tool while manually inserting an image using the Add-On's right click option to see the results.  Rather than squeeze all of the technical explanation into the same post, I thought I'd add a second one to go into all of the gory details and also introduce the Event Monitor tool for anyone that hasn't come across it before...

Linking Org Chart Images

A newsgroup poster asked a question this week about how he could link images within his Org Chart data.

Under normal conditions the Org Chart addon enables you to add images on a one-by-one basis.  The Insert Picture... context menu option produces a file picker dialog that waits for the user to select an image file before continuing its process and this gets in the way of any proper programatic access...

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...

Link to specific page in 'Save As Web'

Today's question - well, this week's anyway - from the newsgroups is how do you link to a specific page within a 'Save As Web' site?