John Goldsmith's visLog

Touch gestures construction – Constraining angles

In this second post on the Touch Gesture shapes construction I thought I’d look at a method for constraining the angle of a shape…

Touch gestures construction – zOrder in groups

In the next few posts I thought I’d take a look at some interesting aspects of the Touch Gesture shapes from a Visio shape development perspective.

To kick things off, this post will look at one way to achieve blending circles, without any [apparent] overlap…

Automating Visio’s Save As Web output

A newsgroup question came up a little while ago about how to automate Visio’s Save As Web function and as this is an area that I’m quite keen on, I thought I’d write a quick post about it.  I’m really just going to cover what’s available in the help files but hopefully it will prove useful just reading from a different perspective.

As I mentioned, all of the documentation is available from the MSDN library, with the additional code samples found in the downloadable Visio 2007 SDK (a 2010 SDK will be available as the Visio gets its official launch in May)…

Drawing RSS icons in Visio – Part 1

I was looking at an RSS icon the other day and thought it would make a good example of how to draw custom shapes in Visio.  You can, of course, use bitmap based images and save yourself all of the drawing, but if you want to include any interaction within the shape and if you want it to scale without degrading then the vector route is the one to choose. 

I’ll split this into two posts:- in the first I’ll look at a 2D icon and use the shape operations functionality and in the second, I look at a 3D icon and try and break down the shape in terms of its colours…

Building dynamic hyperlinks

Moving on from the previous post, where I looked at the basics of hyperlinks in Visio, today I’m going to consider how to build dynamic hyperlinks using the ShapeSheet.

I’ve thought up a couple of slightly contrived examples to demonstrate how this functionality might be applied but there are no doubt many other applications out there and I’d love to hear if you have other examples...

Using Visio hyperlinks

I thought I’d take a quick break from looking at the new features in Visio 2010 and turn to a topic that pops up fairly regularly in newsgroups – Hyperlinks...

Visio 2010 – Custom context menus

You’ll have to forgive the poor menus analogy, but I get bored with the same old pictures…

Anyway, on with another new feature in Visio 2010 – Multi-level custom context menus.  The current and previous versions of Visio have allowed you to add custom menu items to the context menu of pages and shapes and if you haven’t done so yourself, you only need to right-click on some of the built-in shapes such as the ‘Flowchart shapes’ shape (in the Basic Flowchart Shapes stencil) to see them at work.  One limitation, however, has been the inability to group the menu items into any kind of hierarchy.  Basically, all menu items that you add, get placed at the top level.  Visio 2010 changes that…

Link (size) data to shapes

Just off the 2010 track for a second, this is a quick post in response to a newsgroup question about how to link size data, in a spreadsheet, to the shapes in a Visio 2007 document.  (Note that the Link data to shapes functionality is only available in Visio 2007 Professional.)

Visio 2010 – ShapeSheet Intellisense and formula editing

I’ve been getting my hands dirty with the new Technical Preview of Visio 2010 and it’s got some great new features.  In no particular order, I’m going to start off with a couple of new ShapeSheet features that have caught my eye...

Simple Visio Bullet Graph

Well, moving on from the Sparkline shape in my previous post, this time I thought I’d look at how to go about building a Bullet Graph using Visio.  To quote its inventor, Stephen Few, a Bullet Graph “is designed to display a key measure, along with a comparative measure and qualitative ranges to instantly declare if the measure is good, bad or in some other state.”

If you want more details on Bullet Graphs or dashboard design in general then I recommend you buy his book “Information Dashboard Design”.  For this post I’m going to concentrate on how to build the shape itself…