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Diagram Types

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A Visio Countdown to Xmas

I presented a Visio deck of cards in a previous post ( see http://blog.bvisual.net/2014/12/03/a-visio-deck-of-cards/ ), and now I present a real game that can be played with Visio over the holiday season. Countdown is a British TV programme with word and number puzzles. It was the first programme to be aired on Channel 4, and 70 series have been broadcast since its debut on 2 November 1982. With over 6,000 episodes, Countdown is one of the longest-running game shows in the world, along with the original French version, Des chiffres et des lettres, which has been running on French television continuously since 1965. Read more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countdown_%28game_show%29.

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A Visio Deck of Cards

Sometimes I try ideas out in Visio without a specific goal in mind, and I have been creating a Visio deck of cards recently, so I thought I would share it. In fact, I have only created one card but it is capable of being any card in the deck by changing its shape data! I can even get a randomly generated card … all without any code except for formulas in the ShapeSheet.

Firstly, I used four icons for hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades, from my set of metro icons stencils ( see http://blog.bvisual.net/2012/11/20/announcing-metro-icons-and-a-windows-app-tile-shape-for-visio/ ). I decided to keep the icons for the suits separate, with four per suit, but linked their visibility to a Suit Shape Data fixed list row. I also displayed the Value Shape Data as the text of each icon.

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I added a Face Up Shape Data row so that the suit and value are hidden by the Microsoft Office logo.

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Union Jacked?

I am in Edinburgh, capital of Scotland, today. All talk is of the vote on Scottish independence next week … so, I thought I would make a Union Jack Visio shape that can be automatically changed, using Shape Data values, to represent the countries left in the union!

The Union Jack is comprised of the flags of England, Scotland and Ireland … sorry Wales, you are only a principality. Yes, I know that Northern Ireland is a province, but it was decided that St Patrick’s Saltire should be kept even after Eire got independence.

Note that a single country flag has an aspect ratio of 5:3, but a multi-country union flag has an aspect ratio of 2:1.

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Creating a Schema from Visio External Data record sets

Visio introduced External Data record sets in 2007, and I have made great use of them ever since. Visio 2013 has deprecated reverse engineering of databases to produce a schema, which was a function that I loved to use because it allowed me to provide clients with up to date, annotated, enhanced schema diagrams. Microsoft have, however, provided some nice database schema templates in Visio 2013 Professional, so I thought I would provide a way to use the External Data record sets to produce schema diagrams.

I have created a new custom stencil, based upon the IDEF1X Database Notation template in Visio 2013 Professional, and have added some macros to provide the guided diagramming. I say guided because page position of tables and relationships are left to you, but the macros will create table definitions from External Data record sets.

All of the three database notation templates contain an Entity and an Attribute master. In fact, they also have a Primary Key Attribute master too, but this is identical to the Attribute master, apart from a setting to say it is the primary key. This can be done from the Attribute shape anyway, so I will dispense with the Primary Key Attribute master.

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Visio Map of the World Update

My earlier post about the world in Visio shapes, see http://blog.bvisual.net/2013/08/16/visio-map-of-the-world/ , has been one of my most popular, and a reader recently asked about changing the colour of countries by data not in my original worksheet, and another asked about adding labelled dots.

Well, at first, I thought it would be quite simple to add more Data Graphics with the Color By Value that I already had, but then I realised that I needed to adjust some of the shapes that I had created from SVG in my previous article.

The problem is that some of the country shapes which were converted from SVG have geometry at the top group level. This means that any Data Graphic items, other than Color By Value, are actually sub-shapes of the group and will be hidden by the country shape itself. That is probably why the Data Graphics task, on the selected Afghanistan shape below, sent the AF label over to the right of it, whereas all the group shapes with all their geometry in sub-shapes, such as the AE (United Arab Emirates) shape, placed the label in its centre.

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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.

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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