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Visio news from MS Ignite 2019

Daniel, Scott, me and Michel at the Veeam party

Microsoft Ignite 2019 at the huge Orange County Conference Conference Center in Orlando is over for another year. 30,000 attendees over 6 days, and I have seen my first sunlight today since I arrived in Florida last Saturday! So, it is time to review just what was announced about Visio, and how much Visio is appreciated.

There were a number of the Microsoft Visio development team over from Hyderabad, which is quite a journey, and we Visio users are extremely grateful for their continuing dedication to data visualization. There were three of us Visio MVPs presenting and helping out on the four Visio booths this year, which is one more than usual because Michel Laplane, from France, joined Scott Helmers, from USA, and myself. In general, Michel and I manned the Visio Visual booth, whilst Scott spent time on the Visio Integrated Workflow with Shilpa. Mukul and Abhishek were usually found showing off Visio for Teams, and Dharmanand Singh (Principle Software Engineering Manager ) and Shashank were on the Visio Data Visualizer booth. Prateek, Saurabh and Manjiri Deshpandi ( Senior Design Manager ) floated where necessary…

Mukul, me, Abhishek, Michel, Shilpa, Rishabh, Scott, Dharmanand and Shashank

Rishabh used to be in the Visio team, but has since moved on within Microsoft.

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Changing Visio Shape Size and Angle with Linked Data

I was recently laying out a computer room floor plan to scale in Visio, from survey data of the cabinets\racks within it, and it occurred to me that I could work a bit smarter than I first thought. Originally, I was going to just add lots of rectangles, size them, rotate them, and label each them with their name. Then I thought, why not use the Width, Depth and Name columns from the survey data to do most of the work for me? It was so simple to do, and only took a few minutes, so I thought I would share my methodology because it demonstrates how easy it is to work smarter with Visio….

These are the simple steps shown above, written out for your education….

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Prototyping Visio ShapeSheet Formulas in Excel

I am working on an application where the horizontal axis of the Visio page represents dates from left to right. In fact, the each of the fixed horizontal grids are 1 day, and I need to have shapes that understand the begin date at the left edge of the shape, and the end date at the right edge of the shape. There is, therefore, a number of elapsed days representing by the width of the shape. However, the underlying grid can either represent all days, or it can be changed to only represent weekdays by omitting the weekends. I struggled to find the best formula to calculate the elapsed days or weekdays between two dates in Visio ShapeSheet formulas, so I turned to Excel to provide an inspiration. The Visio ShapeSheet is modelled on the Excel worksheet, and formulas can be entered into the cells in much the same way. However, the available functions differ since Excel is mainly used for arithmetic and statistics, but Visio is used for graphics and data. In this article, I demonstrate how I used C# and Excel to construct and test formulas for use in a Visio shape.

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Replacing Images in Visio Shapes by Changing Data

I wrote an article last year about Swapping Images in a #Visio Shape manually, but I want to be able to do this whenever a Shape Data value changes. This is because I use I invariably use shapes linked to data. I also want to be able to have multiple images within a single grouped shape, and all of them changing when their referenced Shape Data values change. I believe that this will be more adaptable for a lot of scenarios than trying to repurpose Data Graphic Icon Sets ( see  Make Your Own Visio Data Graphic Icons Sets … automatically). I also discovered that the Shape.ChangePicture(…) function can just as easily work with urls as it can with network file paths, so even more possibilities are opened up! For example, the Visio Online JavaScript API has the ability to overlay an image (see ShapeView.addOverlay(…)).
So, I have created some macros to provide quick and easy selection, positioning and updating of images within a group shape.

personphotosbydata


I decided to present this article with VBA code rather than my preferred C# so that a stencil could be downloaded to provide instant usability, rather than having to install an add-in. It can be download from Image Utils.vssm, and should then be placed in to My Shapes folder, so that it becomes available to open in Visio. When it is opened, then the macros will need to be enabled.
There are just five public macros:

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Visio Roadmap @ MSIgnite 2018

VisioRoadmap2018

The first slot of the day at the furthest away room from the main conference area is not the ideal time to present anything, but those attendees that made it saw how many new features have been added to Visio recently, and what is soon to be added. The session recording should be available soon, but for those who can’t wait, here is a spoiler! ( View the session here )

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Using SharePoint Links and Hyperlinks in Visio

A current project of mine has caused me to look more closely at the use of links and hyperlinks in “modern” SharePoint Online libraries. Every “modern” SharePoint Online library gets the option to create a new Link in addition to any other content types. They are InternetShortcut files with a .url extension. Only the filename is easily editable once created because the target url is within the file, and no editor is provided. However, it does provide a method to create a repository of approved urls. The alternative approach is to create a column of Hyperlink type, which can be edited easily. This article looks at the implications of each when used in SharePoint Online and used within an external data recordset in Visio, with the intention of providing shapes with hyperlinks.


The video above shows how a Link is created in SharePoint Online, whilst the video below shows how a Hyperlink can be created (and edited).

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