John Goldsmith's visLog

Using Themes in Visio 2013

One of the new features in Visio 2013 is the expanded theming capabilities that enable you to apply a uniform look and feel to shapes within a page, and across multiple documents. 

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.

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...

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…

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.

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…

Using sketchy fonts in Visio

Some time ago I looked at how to create random custom line patterns in Visio.  Today I spotted an interesting free sketchy feel font called ‘Sketchetik Light’, via Smashing Magazine, and thought it would be useful for the Visio wireframers out there…

Creating random custom line patterns - Part 2

Following on from the previous post on creating custom line patterns, in this post I'm going to look at ways to produce a random pattern such as a pencil effect...

 

Creating random custom line patterns - Part 1

Today, I thought I'd take a look at how to go about creating random effect custom line patterns.  As usual this is prompted by a newsgroup poster, who wanted to give his work an unfinished or work in progress look.

Custom line patterns aren't as straight forward as they might appear so I'm going to split this post in two: part one will deal with how custom line patterns work in a general sense and part two will look at creating the random patterns themselves.