I was recently exploring the ShapeSheet formulas available in Visio that affect colors, and I decided that I needed to make a shape that I can change the fill color, tint, shade and tone of dynamically. This allows me to copy the formulas from a Shape Data row value for pasting into a ShapeSheet cell.
A few years ago, I wrote an article about displaying the RGB value of shapes ( see http://blog.bvisual.net/2010/04/22/displaying-the-rgb-values-of-shapes ). I had forgotten about it, but a reader recently asked if it was possible to force the Foregnd field to display the RGB value for the standard color palette values. For example, red is number 2 in the palette, and has a value of RGB(255,0,0). In revisiting the article, I realised that there is a smarter way to display the values, without the need of any macros.
I simply created a master shape that exposes each of the cells in the Fill and Line sections as Shape Data rows. This allows me to enter values in the Shape Data window and see the effect on the shape immediately. So, it was easy to drop one shape, insert text fields, and then use the Array Shapes tool to layout the shapes. Finally, I just entered the the standard color map numbers 0 to 24 in the FillForegnd Shape Data row.
Everyone knows that you can change the colour of Visio shapes. Most people know that you can also change the fill pattern too.
Microsoft Office Visio 2007 Professional provides the ability to color shapes by different values in selected cells. This is great, but just how many color variations can your eyes detect? If you have lots of different values, then the color by value automatically produced colors can look too similar to be able to distinguish them apart. In this article, I propose a method of automatically assigning different fill patterns to similar colors so that they can be visually separated.
[Read more…] about Using Fill Patterns with DataGraphic Color By Value
