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Adding the Sixth Legend Icon in Visio 2010

In my previous two articles, I described how to have 6 icons in a Data Graphic Icon Set, and provided some VBA code to make your own icons sets from existing Visio shapes or images. One thing that I overlooked was the Insert Legend command in Visio 2010, because it does not add the sixth icon automatically, so this blog describes how to add it. As a side effect, the code also enables the legend labels of icon and CBV (Color By Value) items to be edited.

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When you use the Insert Legend command, it examines the Data Graphics used on the active page, to create legends for each Icon Set or Color By Value settings that it finds. Closer examination of the legend shapes, shows that an instance of the Icon Set master shape is added for each of the icons found.

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Make Your Own Visio Data Graphic Icons Sets … automatically

In my last post, I showed how you can actually have up to six icons in a Visio Data Graphics Icon Set ( see http://davidjpp.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/how-to-have-six-icons-in-a-visio-data-graphic-icon-set/ ), and I finished by saying that I would now show how to create new icon sets from existing shapes … automatically. In fact, I will show you how to do it with existing SmartShapes or with images.

I was asked to make KPI icons from six weather images:

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Changing Embedded Visio Report Column Headers

Most Visio users should know that there is a built-in basic report writer. I use it often, but I do get frustrated sometimes. I wrote a chapter about it in my 2007 book (see https://bvisual.net/resources/visualizing-information-with-microsoft-visio/ ), where I explained how you can edit the XML of an external report to change the column headers, but this can be a bit of a pain if the report is embedded in you document. Therefore, I have written some VBA code to provide the ability to edit embedded report column headers.

For example, here is a standard report for equipment within a rack:

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Which field is that cow in?

I reader of one of my earlier posts, Copy Data from one Shape to Another ( see http://davidjpp.wordpress.com/2009/02/02/copying-data-from-one-shape-to-another/ ) asked how a cow can inherit the field number of from the field that it in. I think that this is just an example of how you can automatically update any Shape Data value from an underlying container, but I will use a cow in a field example anyway. This example uses VBA code, but should be good to use in any version of Visio since Visio 2000.

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How to Run VBA Macros from a Ribbon Button in Visio 2010

A colleague, who is an experienced Visio tutor, asked me how to hook VBA macros to the Fluent UI Ribbon. He figured that it must\should be easy, but he can’t see where it is done. Well, this question has resonance because a plea was made to the Microsoft Visio team at our recent MVP Conference that this often asked for feature should be made easy for the macro developer. Now, I must admit that I have been so busy writing .Net Visio Add-Ins and following the pattern for the Fluent UI in VSTO C# code, that I had not appreciated just how convoluted the calling of VBA from a Ribbon button is. So, I thought I would offer a way of doing this in a simple (I hope!) way.

I will show how this can be done for a Visio drawing or template that contains VBA macros, and how this can be also be used for a Visio stencil that contains the code. I know that some macro developers put their code into drawings, but I would always recommend putting the code into a stencil, if the code is to be used by multiple drawings.

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A Patch Panel that can be 1U too

Microsoft Visio 2007 Professional and 2010 Professional and Premium includes the Network / Rack Diagram template, which opens the Rack-mounted equipment stencil. This stencil includes the Patch Panel master which can be stretched from 2U to 25U high. However, I have often required a 1U patch Panel, so I decided to look into the Microsoft shape to see if it could be modified to allow it to be reduced to 1U without looking ridiculous.

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