bVisual Blog by David Parker

Published on January 28, 2022 by David Parker

Understanding Morse Clicks with Visio

A few years ago, I wrote an article about messaging and encryption inspired by a visit to the National Museum of Computing in the UK. I developed a Morse Click shape to demonstrate how Visio can be used to represent and learn Morse Code. However, I never published the shapes here, and my good friend John Marshall recently wrote an article about Braille in Visio, so I thought I should explain how I made the Morse Click shapes, and I took the opportunity to enhance the shapes with some accessibility features that I have learnt since I originally designed them. I have also changed the shapes to be Visio Web friendly, which means, for example, removing shape effects.

I think I learnt Morse Code as a Cub Scout, but forgotten it in the half-century since. Its evolution, and its use today still makes very interesting reading. Each letter comprises of between one and four short or long clicks, whilst each number has five such clicks. Generally, the most used letters have lesser clicks, with ET being the lowest number, presumably to save an extra terrestrial money on a phone call home!

Number of Clicks per Character
With page Shape Data Hide Text = False

There are just two master shapes of interest here, Morse Click and Morse Click Rack, and a couple of page Shape Data rows. The Morse Click shape can be anyone of the 36 characters with a simple Shape Data value change, whilst the Morse Click Rack is a list shape and can spell out the words of up to 26 Morse Click shapes within it.

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Published on January 10, 2022 by David Parker

SS Plus for Visio enhanced to support non-English PowerPoint Smart Layouts

A while ago, I wrote an add-in for Visio Plan 2, SS Plus, that enhances the PowerPoint export from Visio. This has been working fine for this using Microsoft Office in English, but a problem was recently brough to my attention about non-English users. The problem was that the PowerPoint Smart Layou names are in English, and were not showing up in the drop-down list on the SS Plus Settings dialog. This meant that no Smart Layout was being applied automatically to the export from Visio. Well, I am pleased to report that this has now been fixed, and existing users can upgrade free of chare, whilst others can download to trial for free.

The solution is not absolutely perfect though, because the list may appear initially in English until the first export is done to PowerPoint. SS Plus then grabs the names of the Smart Layouts from PowerPoint in the Office language.

I am afraid that the rest of the text is still in English though, because I am not fluent in anything else … to my shame!

In case there are any other requests, I have also added in a new Feedback form.

Published on December 2, 2021 by David Parker

Visio Presentations for the Microsoft Ignite The Tour 2020

Just when we thought the pandemic was coming to an end, another variant appears to scupper our plans. So, resuming in-person events is delayed, and the world isn’t safe until the world is immunised. Therefore, I decided to make the presentations that I was going to be presenting on the abandoned Microsoft Ignite The Tour last year available, although I did manage to go to London and Copenhagen before we all stopped flying around the globe…

David Parker talking about Microsoft Visio …

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Published on November 22, 2021 by David Parker

Correcting the Text Control Handle on Visio Network Shapes

There are literally thousands of master shapes in the stencils supplied with Microsoft Visio, so I guess that mistakes can creep in. One error that I have noticed is the inability of the default text control handle of many of the network shapes to actually move the text block horizontally.

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Published on November 20, 2021 by David Parker

Using a formula for Shape Data labels prevents multiple updates

I have only been developing Visio solutions for 25 years, but I got a surprise this week when I was trying to understand why I couldn’t update the value of a Shape Data row of multiple selected shapes. It is something that I often do, so it took me a while to understand why I was failing to change the values, even though it appeared to initially change in the Shape Data window. There was no problem selecting the shapes individually, but every time I selected multiple shapes and edited these particular rows, I could see the new value in the Shape Data window, but as soon as I looked at the individual shapes, I could see that the values never got changed. I checked my code in vain, and ran the Events Monitor from the Visio SDK. Visio seemed to enter the Shape Data scope, but then immediately exited it without attempting to apply the new value to the shapes. Very strange!

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Published on November 12, 2021 by David Parker

Have multiple alternate languages in the same Visio diagram

I wrote a Visio add-in a few years ago that provides the ability to switch a multi-page Visio diagram between alternative languages. This particular client had just under a hundred pages of process flowcharts, with hyperlinks between the pages. They had to produce this Visio document in seven different languages and got extremely fed-up with trying to synchronise all the different copies whenever any changes were made, so a single Visio document which can store all of the alterative shape texts and page names was a much simpler time saving-solution. Moreover, Microsoft provide an online cognitive service which is useful for automatic speedy translations, though these can be overridden by a more knowledgeable user.

However, since this add-in was written, Microsoft have changed this translation service, and Visio has introduced 64bit version as the default. Therefore, I have updated the Multi-Language Text for Visio add-in to support both of these, and taken the opportunity to change the installation and licensing system.