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Layers

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Developer Mode for advanced Layer Manager actions

I have had more than one person ask me how to see the full Layer Manager panel, so I must have not made it clear enough in the help file. Visio has a Developer Mode that is simple to switch on, and provides some extra functionality, including a Developer tab in the ribbon. Layer Manager allows you to setup buttons, both as shapes or within the Layer Sets tab, that quickly changes the settings of multiple layers in the page with a single click. I see the setting up of these Layer Set buttons as a more advanced developer task, but the use of them to subsequently quickly change the view as a non-developer task. It seems that not every Visio-user has discovered the Developer Mode, so some trial users of Layer Manager do not see the full potential.

To avoid this I have added a Developer Mode check box menu item on the Layer Manager drop-down menu that can toggle this setting.

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Visio 2010 MVP Session videos reprise

Back in 2012, my fellow Visio MVPs, Scott Helmers and Chris Roth, and I recorded a series of 24 videos about Visio 2010. They were first hosted on Microsoft’s web site, then they put them up on YouTube, they they got deleted :-(. Well, we have managed to retrieve them, and put them back up on YouTube in a new list :-). Most of them are still very relevant and useful!

See Visio 2010 MVP Sessions – YouTube and The Visio 2010 MVP Sessions .

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Assigning Visio Shapes to Layers from Excel Table

I work a lot with layers in Visio, and written an add-in, LayerManager, to assist, but I was asked an interesting question recently: How can shapes by assigned to layers automatically from a list in Excel? So, I thought I would present my solution. This particular request was for a Timeline diagram, where the Milestone shapes are to be on specific layers. So, I just used one of the samples provided with Visio.

  • Sample Timeline has no layers
  • Milestones are group shapes
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Overcoming ‘We can’t open your file in Visio because it exceeds the shape count limit’ in Power BI

If you are one of the increasing number of Power BI users that have discovered that the Visio Visual gives you the great ability to include Visio diagrams in your dashboard, then you may have come across the following error, ‘We can’t open your file in Visio because it exceeds the shape count limit’ in Power BI’, when you try to embed a Visio document. This can be frustrating, but here is a deeper explanation of what is happening … and how you can usually overcome it.

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Controlling Visio layers with linked data

Readers of my blog will know that I use the layers in Visio pages to change the display for different scenarios. My macro to toggle layers on/off has been very popular, and I have written an add-in to manage layers that is widely used. However, I was recently asked if the layer settings can be controlled from linked data. Linking data in Visio has been available in all desktop editions, except Standard, since 2007, and I have written many articles and two books extolling this feature, but I haven’t so far controlled layer settings with it, so this article describes how this can be done … as shown in the following screen recording!

UpdatingLayersFromData
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Fixing the Layers problem with Callouts in Visio

I recently re-discovered an issue with callouts in Visio for a couple of projects that I am working on, and so I had to find a fix. The problem is that the callouts become dis-associated from their target shapes if either the layer visibility of the callout or the target shape is toggled off, and then back on again. This will result in a diagram with shapes without any connected callouts, so moving any of the target shapes will not move their associated callouts with them! I initially came up with a workaround that involved some jiggery-pokery with sub-shapes and layers, but it seems that the problem could have easily been averted if Microsoft had incorporated one specific User-defined Cell from the very start…


First, I should be clear which callouts I am talking about because the word has been used and abused over the years … This article refers to the callouts that are inserted from the Insert / Diagram Parts ribbon group. These are part of the Structured Diagrams concept that was introduced with Visio 2010.

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