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You are here: Home / Visio / Visio 2016 / A Blackstar alphabet in Visio

Published on January 8, 2017 by David Parker

A Blackstar alphabet in Visio

I wrote an article last year for Microsoft, using Visio to explain some bits of messaging and encryption (see Musings on MVP Open Day 2016 at Bletchley Park.pdf ). I finished the article with an unexplained image of a word, well the solution was obviously “BOWIE”, as written on the cover of his final album, Blackstar, released exactly one year ago today.

2017-01-08_17-58-14


Last night, my wife and I went to see Lazarus, which was Bowie’s musical, and a big tick on his bucket list. He died two days after the release of Blackstar, and the soundtrack of my life began to fade….
So, I decided to try to finish the alphabet using a single Visio shape that ch-ch-changes with the ch-ch-character set in the Shape Data window. This obviously required that the original 5 letters were present, and the rest were represented by different parts of a black star. Two characters, W and M, are twice the width of the others.

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The “O” character is the complete star, which is made up of 16 shapes, as displayed below. Selecting a Character Shape Data value causes the display of the sub-shapes to be visible or not.

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The page includes a Hide Text Shape Data row to toggle the display of the actual character in whichever font is applied.

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The Blackstar master shape includes a flipped version in order to accommodate the M and W characters. For these two shapes, the LocPinX is adjusted from Width*0.5 to Width*0.25, and the Width is set to Height*2.
The start sub-shapes contain 16 segments, each of which test their visibility from the presence of their number in a list in the parent shape:

2017-01-08_20-01-32


The sub-shapes have a Segment Shape Data row, whose value is used in the formula for the Geometry1.NoShow cell.

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My Visio document is available from Blackstar.vsdx.
This is a purely theoretical completion of the Blackstar alphabet, just like Lazarus is a theoretical sequel to The Man Who Fell to Earth.

2017-01-08_20-08-39


Thank you, David Jones, for bringing me 46 years of musical pleasure.

Related

Filed Under: Shape Data, ShapeSheet Formulas, Visio 2016 Tagged With: Shape Data, ShapeSheet Functions

About David Parker

David Parker has 25 years' experience of providing data visualization solutions to companies around the globe. He is a Microsoft MVP and Visio expert.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. lola says

    August 23, 2021 at 6:45 pm

    sadly that blog is no longer at the attached link….but i would love to read [email protected]. And, THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH for creating this alphabet!!! much love, lola

    Log in to Reply
    • David Parker says

      August 23, 2021 at 8:13 pm

      I have updated the links in the article now 🙂

      Log in to Reply

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