John Goldsmith's visLog

Multi color by value using Visio data graphics (2 of 3)

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

Multi color by value using Visio data graphics (1 of 3)

A recent question on the VisioGuy forum asked how you would go about creating a Visio shape that displays multiple colours based on linked data within an Excel workbook.  I thought I’d have a look at how you might tackle this problem…

Building Visio shapes with code

The last post on ‘Modifying the Visio Grid shape’ demonstrates how to change the resizing behaviour of a complex shape from a ShapeSheet perspective.  I used the word ‘modifying’ but, in fact, it’s actually a new shape and one built using code and it’s this aspect that I thought I’d focus on in this post. 

I’d love to encourage anyone who’s not written any code before to keep reading as I think this makes a good challenge for new coders.  If you’re in that boat then you might also want to have a quick read through Just for starters and Looping through to get you going, but the code below has lots of comments and is hopefully self explanatory.

Modifying the Visio grid shape

A recent TechNet forum question asked if it was possible to change to behaviour of the Grid shape, found under ‘Charting Shapes’ stencil.  The existing shape’s size is based on the total number of columns and rows whether they are visible or not.  I thought I’d take a look at one way of changing this…

Creating a color picker in Visio

This post is inspired by a recent one by Saveen Reddy on creating a bitmap color wheel image.  Saveen’s post demonstrates some C# code to generate a png image pixel by pixel.  I thought this might make a handy shape in Visio when you want manipulate colors without opening the modal format dialogs within Visio itself.

Shapes with global values

There was a recent question in the TechNet forum asking how you could have multiple instances of a shape that have both local (specific to each instance) and global (shared) fields.  I thought I’d take a quick look at how you might achieve that.

Using Excel to build Visio ShapeSheet formulae

When building custom shapes in Visio, you can often find yourself having to construct complex formulae that follow a repeatable pattern.  There are a number of ways of attacking this problem that range from writing each formula one at a time through to generating the formula strings in code…

Image grids in Visio

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…

Dot grid backgrounds

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…

How fonts travel in Visio

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…