John Goldsmith's visLog

Creating an ISNUM function in Visio

Many languages include an IsNum / IsNumeric function to check an incoming string value, however this isn’t present in Visio’s ShapeSheet function set.  A recent project required this kind of check and I thought I’d jot down one way of creating a similar function in the ShapeSheet.

Using Bitwise functions in Visio (Part 2)

In the first part of this post about using bitwise functions in Visio, I looked at the theory of how these functions work.  In this part I’m going to put them to work to try and build a flexible shape.

Visio 2013 SDK

The new Visio 2013 software development kit is now available for download, and if you’ve not come across previous versions I thought I’d write a quick review of what’s inside.

Indenting multiple tree control items in Visio

The wireframing template in Visio has a treeview control to that allows you to add and remove items, and set their respective indent levels.  By default you can only adjust a single item at a time and even if you create a multiple selection, only the primary item is effected.  A forum question asked how you could make a single change to multiple items and I thought I would write a quick bit of code to show how you might go about it.

Modifying a Visio master shape

There was a question on the Visio forum recently on how to modify a built-in shape and I thought I'd jot down a quick walkthrough of how you might approach the problem.  In this instance I’m going to change the way the line weight scales, but the principle of how you modify and create your own master will be the same in most cases.

Forcing AutoConnect in Visio

The AutoConnect feature in Visio has been around for a few versions now and in 2010 it included the ability to use Quick Shapes.  I think it’s a great feature and really speeds building professional looking diagrams.  That said it doesn’t suit every scenario and if you find yourself in this situation then this post is about a workaround to prevent the user from turning the feature on or off at document level.

Using Bitwise functions in Visio (Part 1)

This is the first of a two-part post on how to use bitwise functions in the ShapeSheet.  The main driver for this is to make it easier to build complex, but maintainable shapes enabling you to quickly swap between states, both in terms of behaviour and visual appearance. 

Before I get into the ‘how’, in the next post, I thought I’d deal with the ‘what’ in this one.  If you’re already familiar with bitwise operations then feel free to skip to the next post – if not, then don’t worry, the logic here is pretty simple once you understand what’s going on…

New ClippingPath cell in Visio 2013

In amongst some of the new changes in Visio 2013 is the addition of a new ShapeSheet cell in the Foreign Image section.  Since I looked at image masking a few years ago (as did Chris Roth), I thought it would be interesting to take a look what you can now do with this new cell. 

Using page Shape Data in Visio master shapes

I had a question recently on how to include page Shape Data in master shapes.  This sounds like a useful subject for a blog post…

Multi color by value using Visio data graphics (3 of 3)

This is the third and final part of a post on how to create a Visio shape that displays multiple colours based on linked data within an Excel workbook...