As I have said many times, Visio is far more than connected clip art. The shapes can have smarts. Parts of the shape can change by the use of shape data or control handles. It may be the geometry, colour or text. For now, I am going to talk about text. Though there is onlyContinue reading “Are there characters in my field or fields in my characters?”
Author Archives: johnvisiomvp
Connection Strip
There was a recent request in https://visio.uservoice.com/ about Distribute connectors vertically and horizontally and it sounded like an interesting shape to create. It is basically a 1-D shape (a line that is attached to a 2-D shape to add connection points.) The shape has fifteen connection points, but uses Shape Data to make from 1Continue reading “Connection Strip”
ShapeSheet Shapes
A lot of people only know Visio as an app to create business diagrams with clip art and connecting lines. Some have realized you can connect the diagram to a data source like Excel and bring life to the content. Some have also realzed you can add embelishments to the shapes called Data Graphics thatContinue reading “ShapeSheet Shapes”
Best foot forward
One of the things I love about Visio is that if I shape you wants does not exist, you can create it. Contrary to what some Microsoft departments think, Visio is not a collection of static clip art. The shapes can be smart. In addition to shapes, you can make your own fill patterns andContinue reading “Best foot forward”
Visio Stencil Sort
One of the things I noticed when reviewing Visio’s User Voice was the request for being able to have the shapes (they are actually masters) in the stencils be sorted. This is some code I have for keeping the masters in the document stencil sorted. Here is the before and after.
Word Art in Visio
I was searching through Visio User Voice https://visio.uservoice.com/ for ideas of shapes to create and came across a request for converting text to outlines, something Adobe has. The feature does not exist in Visio, but it does exist in the other Office products like Word and PPT. So the easy answer is to create theContinue reading “Word Art in Visio”
Venn Diagram
Today, someone asked where the Venn Diagram was in Visio. There is a support article https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-a-venn-diagram-in-visio-447d65f4-79a3-411d-811d-bfdea7f83e2d The actual description for manually creating a Venn digram is okay, but a bit of overkill. You can just create a circle duplicate it twice, move them apart and distribute them horizontally (only worry about the distance between theContinue reading “Venn Diagram”
Exploring the Visio file
I have been voluntarily supporting Visio for almost thirty years since version 1, after I found a promo version of Visio on a Windows update floppy. Before that I had been creating business diagrams by writing code to drive plotters. The first version was in assembler, the second was in COBOL. The COBOL was farContinue reading “Exploring the Visio file”
Visio Ellipse Part 4
So, why the interest in the Ellipse row? I came across a set of symbols that seemed ideal for Visio and some of the shapes had an interesting way of indicating heat settings. A series of dots from one to six. Initially I wanted to do this as a shapesheet segment, so I worked outContinue reading “Visio Ellipse Part 4”
Visio Ellipse Part 3
Decoupling the ellipse from the shape So, it is easy to create a circle shape and move it around the page, but what is needed to create a circle and move it within a shape? The problem is that the Ellipse row created has cells based on the Height and Width of the containing shape.Continue reading “Visio Ellipse Part 3”
