bVisual

bVisual Blog by David Parker

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Understanding Visio Data Graphic’s Color by Value

The desktop Visio editions, Visio Professional and Visio Plan 2, have a great way of automatically displaying data as Data Bars, Icon Sets, Text Callouts and Color by Value. The first three types of Data Graphics require sub-shapes to be inserted into each shape that they are applied to, but the last one, Color by Value (CBV), merely requires some User-defined Cells and formulas. However, unlike the first three, there can be only one Shape Data value displayed as colours in each Data Graphic (DG). So, how can we easily update the colour assigned to each value using code, rather than manually using the manual dialogs provided?

  • One Data Graphic with 4 CBVs
  • The first in the list is applied
  • Numeric data can have two types of CBV
  • Locating the Data Graphic master
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Update to LayerManager add-in for non-English users

A French user of LayerManager recently reported that the Refresh Counts button was not working for him, and a few other users were recently finding that the trial period was reporting expired immediately after download. Both of these issues have hopefully been addressed in the latest version 23.3.1, which is available for free to current users.

  • Before clicking Refresh Counts
  • After clicking Refresh Counts
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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 are normally available for customization. The label of the connector is bound to the respective column in the Excel table, and that, combined with the ability to modify the Dynamic connector master shape provides a way of overcoming some of the limitations discovered.

So, given that we want to use DV, and we need to have multiple flows between the same shapes, then they cannot be separate connectors. We need to combine multiple flows onto the same connector, and then find a way to selectively display different flows somehow by controlling the visibility of the connectors. However, we cannot make them invisible because they will be deleted by DV, so we need to control their transparency instead. We can do this by interpreting the label somehow, and we are going to modify the Dynamic connector to react to the text of the label, and we can also change the colour and line pattern too.

The following screenshots show the Excel table with the multiple flows between the same shapes concatenated with pipe characters, and the diagram created by Data Visualizer when this table is imported into a custom template using Data \ Create from Data \ Create:

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Pushing Data Visualizer in Visio to the limits!

Regular readers of my blog will know that I like to use the Data Visualizer (DV) in Visio Plan 2, but I recently tried to help a user who really decided to push it to the limits. In this scenario, there were multiple connections, but with different labels, being created between the same flowchart shapes, and the plea was how to make it work! Well, I experimented with this, and found that DV does not really work well in this way, and then proposed an alternative approach, which I will explain in this article.

First, I will show how it fails by setting up an Excel table that does contains multiple connections, but fails to update the labels consistently.

Excel Table with Multiple Links
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Teams Tuesday Podcast Recording about Visio

I am delighted to share the link to my recent demonstration and conversation with fellow MVP Peter Ward about Visio in Teams. We discussed more than just Visio … and I look a bit like Max Headroom!

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Linking Data to Visio Shapes in Code

One of the most useful capabilities of Visio Professional and Visio Plan 2 is to link external data to shapes and have them refreshed by changes in the data source. So, many of my solutions involve writing code to make these links, and they are covered with some VBA examples in my book, Mastering Data Visualization with Microsoft Visio Professional 2016, but I mostly write C# code in VSTO add-ins, so I thought it would be useful to demonstrate how easy it is to create data links by dropping a shape, and by adding links to an existing shape. The book, by the way, is still relevant for the current Visio Professional and Visio Plan 2 editions!

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