A few weeks ago I was introduced to the jQuery Mobile framework at a UK Bing Maps User Group meeting. It looks like a cracking tool for cross browser mobile work and I’m looking forward to using in future projects.
Being a keen Visio man I thought I’d have a go at putting together some shapes for wireframing and mock ups. The following are the results…
I’ve recently been transferring some old VBA ShapeSheet utilities over to a c# add-in for Visio 2010 and hit a problem when trying to add some custom groups to the ShapeSheet Design ribbon tab. Using Ribbon.xml, I was happily able to add groups to either custom tabs or built-in ones such as ‘Home’, but for love nor money couldn’t get anything to show in the ShapeSheet tab.
Chris Hopkins, from the Visio team, kindly set me straight and the solution was in understanding that not all tabs are created equal and that the ShapeSheet Design tab belongs to a set called Contextual Tabs…
Continue reading "Customising Contextual Ribbon Tabs In Visio 2010" »
Congratulations to Chris Roth (aka Visio Guy) who’s just finished a new book on, as the title describes, Using Visio 2010.
I haven’t got my hands on a paper copy yet, as Chris has, but I have had a look at the table of contents and sample chapters available over at the publisher’s site and it looks a pretty comprehensive read. I say read, but there’s also several hours of video and online material to accompany the book.
In the unlikely event that you read this blog and not VisGuy.com then you might not know that Chris is a long time Visio expert (even reaching back into the pre-Microsoft days). It’s no surprise then that his book gives you not just the ‘how’ but also the ‘why’ and ‘when’ to use a specific part of the Visio functionality.
I’m looking forward to buying my physical copy and I’d certainly recommend it to anyone wanting to become more productive in using this great visual tool.
Spotted a few links I thought I’d highlight today:
When you insert an image into Visio, the default behaviour is to add it to a containing shape with the full width and height of the image being visible. If you delve into the ShapeSheet, however, you can expand the image outside of containing shape’s bounds, with the extended area being hidden from view. Visio actually makes use of this in some of its Data Graphics functionality by having an icon strip and moving this left and right depending on which part of the image is required.
Of course you could extend this image shifting to two dimensions and then use a grid based approach in order to address each cell and that’s what I’m going to cover in this post…
Drawing early stage wireframes can often involve sketching out a series of rectangular areas to create a desired structure. Graph paper can feel a little too structured but dot grid paper is a great alternative. I recently came across a very smart notepad from Behance and of course, as this isn’t a new idea, there’s lots of free pdf downloads such as the ones at McGraw Hill. If you want to create your own, however, then Visio can also help…
When you select a particular font in a Visio document, what you are really doing is adding a reference to a font that’s resident on your system. What you don’t always know is that anyone else who opens your document will have the same font on their system and therefore that they will see the document as you intended…
Somewhat overdue, I’ve recently uploaded a single archive page with a link to each post. Hopefully this will make navigation a little easier than the traditional month by month list. The page can be found at:
I came across a set of cloud computing images the other day and thought they’d make a nice Visio stencil set. I contacted Josh Twist, the author, and you can now download the stencil from here. (If you want to download the original png’s then head over to Josh’s post titled ‘Cloud Artwork’.)
Note, all the hard work belongs to Josh – I’ve just added a few connection points and saved them as a new stencil (.vss).
To install the stencil – download and unzip the file above. Move the resulting .vss file to either:
Your My Shapes folder
C:\Users\[User name]\Documents\My Shapes
or your stencils folder, the path for which is described in
File / Options / Advanced / File Locations… / Stencils
Raster images
As you know raster images generally don’t scale well, however the above images are fairly large (averaging somewhere around 1200 x 1200) which means they can be stretched a fair way before pixelating. In general you would want to be careful with image sizes if your drawing is likely to contain a large numbers of instances. In this case, given the abstract nature of the shapes, I think it’s unlikely that you’d see a diagram with 500 instance shapes.
Anyway, they’re a great set of shapes and I hope you find them useful.
[Update 18.04.12 - If you're after other cloud shapes then Visio MVP John Marshall recently sent me this clever shape. It's based on a line pattern and so scales and alters shape, in a rather pleasing way, as it's resized (click on the image to download)]
[Update 14.06.14 - There's also a new Azure stencil download available here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=41937]
Fellow Visio MVP David Parker has just had a new book published covering all of the new structured diagramming and validation functionality available in Visio 2010. I’ve been lucky enough to be sent a copy by the publisher and so I thought I’d write a quick review...
Continue reading "Book review - Microsoft Visio 2010 Business Process Diagramming and Validation" »
