Back in the early noughties, I was part of a start-up company to to visualise the risks of any dependency system. We used Visio, of course, to map operational components and assets into a hierarchy of dependencies that simply displayed the roll-up of perceived risk. One of the demonstration diagrams that we (mainly Humphrey Tizard) constructed in 2003 was for a global pandemic. How prophetic that seems now!
The easy to read RAG status of each element makes it simple to grasp the relationships of risk quickly, and my eyes were immediately drawn to the Red status of Vaccinate. That is exactly where we are at now.
I have often mused on re-vamping this visual risk analysis solution to take advantage of the newer capabilities of Visio desktop and the integration with the web, but, for now, I have simply added in a custom callout shape that displays the contents of the associated Description values in the Shape Data section.
You can view the above diagram in your browser (Pandemic Control), and you can read more about this solution at VRA makes the case for Prudential
When is a Visio Callout not a Callout?
I have been a Visio user/developer since the mid-1990’s and seen the word “callout” used as part of the name of many master shapes in Visio. The images below show five ways that the term “callout” has been applied to the name of Visio master shapes. Generally, each evolution has been an advance on the…
Using Visio Color by Value on Connectors
Data Graphics in Visio Plan 2 and Visio Professional is great, but it only enables us to use them with 2D shapes in Visio, i.e. not on connectors. So, what if you want to change the line colour of the connectors between the 2D shapes because of the data flowing between them? Well, it is…
More Parsing XML Data in Visio Shapes
My last article looked at parsing an XML string with a known structure and order of elements and attributes. This can be acceptable in some scenarios, but what if the elements or attributes are in a different order? Then it is necessary to use the element and attribute names rather than their index position. This…
Highlighting dirty text in Visio shapes
I suppose I should explain what I mean by dirty text first 🙂 I often display the value of a Shape Data row in Visio text, but sometimes the solution requires that the value is also editable. This is ok if the client accepts that all editing is done with the Shape Data window or…
Interactive Demographics of the European Union in Visio
I was recently contacted by a reader, Stanley M. Max (Towson University lecturer), who had started creating a Visio map of the 27 countries in the European Union in 2020, along with the demographics culled from Wikipedia. He wanted to know if the map and stats could be combined to make a more appealing presentation.…
Pushing Data Visualizer in Visio beyond its limits
My last post was about some of the lessons learnt when trying to push Data Visualizer to its limits, but this one has some ways of overcoming these limitations. The main lesson learnt is that DV binds the shapes within the DV container shape, CFF Data Visualizer, and controls some of the ShapeSheet cells that…