I was recently asked how to add a country flag to Visio Org Chart shapes automatically. Well, as I am currently working with world data at the moment, I have taken up the challenge. Firstly, the CIA have an excellent source of information, called the World Factbook ( https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/ ). You can find all sorts of information about every country in the world, including, of course, their flags. There are over 240 countries at the moment, and there are various codes used by different systems to identify them. Even the name may not be the same, for example, do I live in UK, United Kingdom, Great Britain, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland or just plain old England? Answers on a post card, please, addressed to …..?
Alternatively, a country can be identified accurately with a code, but you need to know which system is being used. United Kingdom can be identified by GB in the Iso 2 character system, or 826 in the Iso numeric system, or UK in the FIPS 10 system. The CIA World Factbook utilises the FIPS 10 code, so consequently, all of the country related web pages and images are coded with this system.
I have already created an Access database with all this information, so I decided to use this knowledge to create a Flags of the World Visio Master.
