bVisual

bVisual Blog by David Parker

Published on by

Visio is coming to the web and iOS – Dec. 2016

Microsoft blogged the launch of Visio for iPad and Visio Online Preview yesterday ( see blogs.office.com ). This should be welcome news to every Visio user who wants to increase the consumption of their carefully crafted diagrams. These two new ways of viewing Visio documents (for free) have different capabilities, so I have put some slides together that describe the current differences. Coincidently, Microsoft also announced the upcoming Windows 10 on ARM processors ( see Windows Central ), so the ability to create Visio diagrams is going to be possible on mobile devices too!

[Read more…] about Visio is coming to the web and iOS – Dec. 2016

Published on by

MS TechDays Sweden 2016 – Visio and SharePoint BPM portals

I am on my way home after presenting and demoing Visio and SharePoint BPM portals at Kistamassan near Stockholm. I was staying at the Scandic Victoria Tower right next door. Very handy, and very tall. It is a striking building, as can be seen in my photos below, however, speaking as an ex-architect, I was disappointed to find the modern interior spoilt by large, but inadequate, curtains that took several minutes to draw over the large number of triangular windows in my room. I really think it would have been worth installing electric auto-tinting glass.

[Read more…] about MS TechDays Sweden 2016 – Visio and SharePoint BPM portals

Published on by

Visio Pro for Office365 Partner Templates

It is becoming clear that Microsoft are making Visio Pro for Office365 (VPfO) their priority. Its update cadence is much quicker than the non-cloud versions of Visio, and there are some features that may not make it to them. A case in point is partner templates and sample diagrams. It appears that Categories has been renamed as Templates in VPfO and there is a new tab named Sample Diagrams. The Partner Templates are at the bottom of the Templates tab, and there is a Partner Sample Diagrams section too on the Sample Diagrams tab.


I am pleased to note that five of my templates made it into the Education category. Each of these templates are from earlier blog posts here!

Published on by

US State Flags for Visio

I am working on a project where I thought the US State flags might be useful, so I quickly created a new master shape from the images in Wikipedia. The shape simply provides a selection of one of the states from the Shape Data window (plus one extra for the reverse of Oregon’s flag!).

The flag shape has a couple of Shape Data rows:

[Read more…] about US State Flags for Visio

Published on by

MSIgnite Sessions to Watch in Visio

Sessions2Watch.gif

Well, MS Ignite is over for another year. I planned to visit loads of sessions, but the reality was that I spent many hours on the Visio booth. Fortunately, many of them were recorded, including ours, but I don’t have time to watch over 700 videos! So, I looked through them all and picked out 50-odd, and used Get & Transform in Excel again to create suitable queries to link to Visio.

The more I use PowerQuery, the more I like it. I was able to extract the unique values in the Personas, Tags, and Products columns which each contained comma separated lists. I data-linked these values to large circles on different pages, and data-linked the Sessions to Watch to hexagonal shapes. I then wrote a little VBA code to link the circles to the hexagons with data-linked connectors. Data Graphics was applied to all shapes, including the connectors, and a legend added. Each of the Session hexagons have an automatically created hyperlink to the On-Demand Video. I used a standard radial page layout so that I had minimal manual movement shapes.
The end result is a visual dashboard by Persona, Tag and Product to open the videos for the sessions I want to watch.

[Read more…] about MSIgnite Sessions to Watch in Visio