John Goldsmith's visLog

Simple Visio Sparkline implementation

 

Visio is a great tool for representing complex systems and data and the data graphics functionality in 2007 makes the communication of data even simpler than before.  The charting stencil however, while providing an array of charting shapes, doesn’t make it easy to tie actual data to respective chart and so I thought I’d have a look, over the next few posts, at some custom chart shapes that deal more directly with the underlying data.  First off is Edward Tufte’s Sparkline chart…

3 ShapeSheet Tips (Part 2 - Formula Tracing)

Continuing with my ShapeSheet Tips series (part 1, part 3), today I'm going to look at a tool that helps when trying to understand the relationships between cells within the Visio ShapeSheet - Formula Tracing...

Happy birthday to me - free shape for you

Question: What have Britt Ekland, The Moulin Rouge and this blog got in common?

Answer: They were all born today, 6th October.

While both Britt Ekland and The Moulin Rouge already have a number of birthdays under their belts this is the first for this blog.  To celebrate I thought I'd hand out a free calendar shape by way of a small thank you for reading. (Download Calendar.vsd)

3 ShapeSheet Tips (Part 1 - Insert Function)

I recently spotted a feature in Visio's ShapeSheet window that, up to now, I'd missed.  It's the Insert Function menu option and I thought this would be rather useful, particular for anyone who's just beginning ShapeSheet development.  While I'm in the ShapeSheet area, I'll also highlight a couple of other handy tools that you may or may not have come across, namely Formula Tracing and the Style Explorer, and I'll cover these in the next two posts...

Highlighting images using a mask

A newsgroup question caught my attention recently and I thought I'd employ the above sheep to help solve the problem.  I met them on a walk with my wife on holiday in Scotland and, while they know next to nothing about Visio, they make a useful sample image for this post. 

The question - "How do you highlight part of an image in Visio"?

Whilst you can get to a number of image properties via Format / Picture... and the ShapeSheet, spot highlighting (or any other localized pixel-level manipulation) isn't one of them...

Hiding Pages

A recent question in the newsgroups made me think about how you could hide pages using just the ShapeSheet.  The answer to hiding pages is usually a programmatic one, often for good reasons, however I thought I'd have a go at a ShapeSheet only approach as an alternative...

Just for starters

So, this being the first proper post, I'm going to kick things off with a look at some of the basics of how to get at both the ShapeSheet and the VBA programming environment so that I can refer people back to this in future posts if required.

This is by no means a full course; it's intended to be a quick run through of the key elements for anyone who's not tried any ShapeSheet or VBA development before.