bVisual

bVisual Blog by David Parker

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Using Emojis in Visio

In the new normal of social distancing, we can easily miss the nuances of facial expressions with the the various electronic communication platforms that we utilise. In our personal communications via mobile apps, we have all started to use Emojis to express sentiment and actions, although we can sometimes convey the wrong meanings unintentionally as some Emojis get re-purposed by certain sections of society. Microsoft Windows 10 added native support for Emojis a year ago, and they can be inserted into many Microsoft applications using the onscreen keyboard 👀:

Windows 10 Onscreen Keyboard
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Microsoft Visio Partner hub

My company became a Visio business partner in 1998, so that was a couple of years before Microsoft acquired Visio for what was their largest purchase at the time. Microsoft wound down the annual Visio worldwide conferences that used to happen, and Visio partners became lost in the much larger multi-faceted Microsoft partner community. We lost the hub where Visio solution providers, or companies that used Visio within their own applications, or just business productivity users, could share ideas and cross-fertilize. I still have friends and connections from those pre-Microsoft days, and we also have a small number of Microsoft MVPs who specialise in Visio who keep up regular contact. What we missed is a central hub that anyone can access to find partners that have Visio skills, either for development or knowledge transfer, or can have applications that utilise Visio. So it is very welcome to see that Microsoft have now revamped their Visio partner portal to include featured partners and solutions. Please check out this web page and I think the partners are fortuitously listed alphabetically for me….

Visio Business Partner 1998

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Using some Visio Shape Data in Visio for the Web

Like a lot of UK TV viewers last week, I watched Quiz, a drama about Major Charles Ingram who apparently cheated his way to the jackpot in Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Some of the questions that he was asked were quoted in that show, and I was surprised how easy the last two questions were for me, but that was probably because of my own education as a building architect. However, I decided to lookup the rest of the questions, and I would have fallen before getting to those questions unless my Phone-A-Friend could have helped me on one in particular. At the same time, I was thinking about the differences between Visio desktop and web editions (yeah, really!), so I have created a Visio document that contains all of the questions that the Major answered correctly. This document can be viewed by everyone and downloaded. If it is saved into OneDrive or SharePoint Online and then viewed online.

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Visual Risks of a Global Pandemic

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!

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Viewing Visio Files in Public Websites

Some of my colleagues have asked me how I have managed to include Visio files into this public website, so I thought I would share my secret. Microsoft has kindly provided a File Viewer Web Part for use in SharePoint that appears to be useful in other websites too.

If you view a Visio file that is stored on OneDrive or in SharePoint Online, you can get the </> Embed code for the Visio document from the Show More Commands (…) button in the top right corner. This is normally intended for use within SharePoint pages.

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Using CODE() and UNICODE() functions in Visio

Microsoft Visio does have CHAR() and UNICHAR() ShapeSheet functions, just like Excel, but it does not have the inverse CODE() and UNICODE() functions, unlike Excel. However, there is a way to create a formula in the Visio ShapeSheet to provide these functions.

The following worksheet demonstrates how the CHAR(), CODE(), UNICHAR(), and UNICODE() functions work in Excel.

ColumnFormula
Indexn
Char=IFERROR( CHAR(INT([@Index])),””)
Code=IFERROR( CODE([@Char]),””)
Unichar=UNICHAR(INT([@Index]))
Unicode=UNICODE([@Unichar])
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