bVisual Blog by David Parker

Published on November 28, 2013 by David Parker

The First MVP Conference in Hyderabad, India

Back in February this year, I reported on the Visio MVPs in Redmond (see http://blog.bvisual.net/2013/02/ ).Well one thing that we learnt back then was that Microsoft had started the transition of the Visio Engineering to Hyderabad in India. Later, Microsoft also announced that the MVP Summits were going to be changed from spring to fall (or autumn if you are not North American). So, this year was to be exceptional because there was going to be two MVP Summits whilst the transition took place. That left the new Visio team in a bit of a quandary : where to hold the fall summit? Redmond, with the rest of the MVP community, or Hyderabad, with just the Visio product team? I was delighted that they took the brave step of holding it in Hyderabad, whilst the rest of the MVPs went to Redmond last year.

Published on September 12, 2013 by David Parker

Visio Day in Oslo

I was honoured to be invited to present at a Microsoft hosted event in Oslo yesterday about Visio and Business Intelligence … or is it Intelligent Business?

I presented a few examples of work that we have undertaken for clients around the world, from process flows in Australia, to road maps and fault tree analysis in UK, to network equipment cabinet layouts internationally, and global WAN diagrams.

Although I have been teaching Visio Services around Europe for the last 18 months, I was keen to demonstrate that Visio can be used for more than BI dashboards in SharePoint, and a little bit of customisation can go a long way.

I was very impressed by the a demo of PowerView, even if it was in Norwegian.

A special thanks to Thomas Bjørgan from Cenika for his presentation, see a demo of their Visio application Centech Draw below .

Published on August 16, 2013 by David Parker

Visio World Time Zones

My last post about a world map inspired me to find a time zone map that could be used in Visio. I found an SVG map at

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Standard_time_zones_of_the_world_%282012%29.svg that I could convert, and link a list of time zones from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_zones_by_UTC_offset that I put into Excel.

I have used Visio’s Color By Value Data Graphics, so you can easily edit the colour scheme.

You can download this map from WorldTimeZones.vsdx

Published on August 16, 2013 by David Parker

Visio Map of the World

I have often wanted a Visio map of the world, with countries that can be linked to data. There are a number of Visio country shapes that are available for download on the internet, but they are fairly old, and certainly don’t have an up to date world. For example, South Sudan is currently the newest country in the world (2011), though a lot of resources on the web don’t show it. So, I was relieved to find a good SVG world map at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BlankMap-FlatWorld6.svg?uselang=en-gb . Even better was that each of the shapes are named with the ISO2 code. This meant that I could use Link Data to Shapes to automatically create Shape Data from an Excel worksheet that I put together from various sources.

Note that I had to add Kosovo manually, since it was not on the original map, as it’s status as a country is in dispute. The ISO codes have apparently been temporarily assigned.

[Read more…]

Published on July 8, 2013 by David Parker

MVP Sessions for Getting Started with Visio 2010

Back in June 2012, I announced the Microsoft sponsored MVP Sessions for Visio 2010 (see http://blog.bvisual.net/2012/06/29/mvp-sessions-wheel/ ). Well, Visio 2013 has been released since then, so Microsoft have changed the links for the videos. So, I have created a web page to provide access to them: http://www.visiorules.com/gallery/MVPSessions/MVPSessions.htm

I have also created a pdf file with hyperlinks : http://www.visiorules.com/gallery/MVPSessions/MVPSessionsWheel.pdf

Published on June 18, 2013 by David Parker

Comparison of Visio Save As Web Outputs

SharePoint 2013 Visio Services provides a great solution for viewing the actual Visio file directly within a SharePoint web page, however you need to be logged into your corporate web to do this. So, how can you view Visio files in a web page if you cannot use Visio Services?

You could build a web page with the Visio Viewer control, but that is ActiveX and will only work in certain controlled conditions. The benchmark has to be allowing the Visio file to be viewed on an iPad, or an Android tablet, or Surface RT. Visio Services in SharePoint 2013 will enable this, and will allow for the Visio document to be zoomed, panned, and the Shape Data and hyperlinks to be viewed and used, but, again, this is not always available.