John Goldsmith's visLog

Indexed colors across languages in Visio

If your users operate in different system languages then you need to consider what happens to your formulas when a document, authored in one language, is edited in a different one.

LOCTOLOC and LOCTOPAR - Understanding Visio Transform Functions

Visio has a number of ShapeSheet transform functions that allow you to transform a point expressed in one shape's coordinate space to the coordinate space of another one.

How to change multiple HSL values at once in Visio

When creating a set of colors that work well together you often want to change the saturation and luminosity levels on all of the colors at once. There are some amazing color tools out there, but up to now I've not found any that lets me do this en-masse adjustment.

So I thought I'd try and create a utility tool in Visio that lets you do this.

Creating a Visio shape with an expanding row count

In this post I'm going to look at one option for creating a table style shape that increases its row count as it is resized vertically.

Enhancing Visio Event Monitor Output

The Visio Event Monitor that's part of the SDK is a great tool for understanding how Visio works and the events that are firing away while you work. So in this post I thought I'd demonstrate a quick technique for making the output a little easier to read.

Visio Congress Shapes - Construction

Following on from my previous post, I thought I'd move on and look at some interesting aspects of the Congress shapes from a Visio construction perspective.

Creating an IsMetric function in Visio

In Visio, a page's drawing units are defined by the value found in the DrawingScale cell. Like all cells you can interrogate this in code via the Cell.Units property, but in the ShapeSheet, there's no direct method to find out the same information. So I thought I'd write down one way you could approach this.

FormulaU and FormulaForceU in Visio

This is a quick post on some of the differences between the two methods of setting a cell formula.

Using Util.Dif in LINQPad with Visio

As of version 5.25, LINQPad has a new object diff’ing method that’s great for comparing objects and tracking down problems in code and this, of course, also applies to Visio.

Action cell execution in Visio

Action cells in Visio react differently from the others and you can use this behaviour to your advantage when building complex shapes.