John Goldsmith's visLog

Synchronizing page zoom 'WithEvents'

How do you synchronize the page zoom level and window view across all pages in a Visio document?  This was a recent (paraphrased) question in the newsgroups and caught my eye as an interesting problem...

Creating random custom line patterns - Part 2

Following on from the previous post on creating custom line patterns, in this post I'm going to look at ways to produce a random pattern such as a pencil effect...

 

Creating random custom line patterns - Part 1

Today, I thought I'd take a look at how to go about creating random effect custom line patterns.  As usual this is prompted by a newsgroup poster, who wanted to give his work an unfinished or work in progress look.

Custom line patterns aren't as straight forward as they might appear so I'm going to split this post in two: part one will deal with how custom line patterns work in a general sense and part two will look at creating the random patterns themselves.

Hiding Pages (with VBA)

This post is a continuation of a previous one on how you might go about hiding pages within the Visio UI.  While the previous post offered a possible ShapeSheet only approach, today I'm going to look at the problem from a code perspective...

Escaping from Save as Web Page links

Following some recent interest in a newsgroup question I answered earlier this year, about how to make Shape Data hyperlinks live in a web page, I thought I'd describe the steps in a little more detail.  My discovery of this workaround is due to Chris Roth (aka the VisGuy.com) for pointing out the likely direction to look for a solution, so my thanks to you Chris.

Highlighting images using a mask

A newsgroup question caught my attention recently and I thought I'd employ the above sheep to help solve the problem.  I met them on a walk with my wife on holiday in Scotland and, while they know next to nothing about Visio, they make a useful sample image for this post. 

The question - "How do you highlight part of an image in Visio"?

Whilst you can get to a number of image properties via Format / Picture... and the ShapeSheet, spot highlighting (or any other localized pixel-level manipulation) isn't one of them...

Hiding Pages

A recent question in the newsgroups made me think about how you could hide pages using just the ShapeSheet.  The answer to hiding pages is usually a programmatic one, often for good reasons, however I thought I'd have a go at a ShapeSheet only approach as an alternative...

Looping through

Following on from my previous post, in which I covered some ShapeSheet and VBA basics, today I'm going to look at some simple looping programming methods that do something a little more practical.

There are many situations where you'll need to run through all of the shapes on a page to carry out an operation.  This might be in order to check each shape to see if it meets a particular criteria, (for example, only shapes based on a particular master) or perhaps to change a value in every single shape (maybe to change a base URL)...

Just for starters

So, this being the first proper post, I'm going to kick things off with a look at some of the basics of how to get at both the ShapeSheet and the VBA programming environment so that I can refer people back to this in future posts if required.

This is by no means a full course; it's intended to be a quick run through of the key elements for anyone who's not tried any ShapeSheet or VBA development before.

Welcome

Hello and welcome to a new blog about all things Visio.  My aim with this blog is twofold:

• to take a look at some of the regular problems that tend to crop up on the newsgroups
• to encourage users who perhaps weren't aware of or haven't delved into the ShapeSheet and programming that makes Visio such a powerful tool

If this is the only Visio blog you've come across then you may be glad to know that it's not the only one and it's my intention to point you towards other sites over the coming posts.  (There's a list of the ones I read over on the right.)