Microsoft Visio Plan 2 has a cool feature, Slide Snippets, that can create a PowerPoint slide show from special rectangle shapes placed around the pages of a Visio document. Unfortunately, there is currently an issue with distortion of the images in PowerPoint, so I will show how this can be fixed manually…
I am working on a Visio VSTO project where I need to synchronise a UI element with the current session Microsoft Office Theme. At first, I thought that there would be some way of getting a value from the Visio object model, but I was wrong…
The Office Theme can be selected from either the Visio Options, or the Account Options panels.
[Read more…] about Getting the Microsoft Office Theme ValueI 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.
[Read more…] about Assigning Visio Shapes to Layers from Excel TableI was trying to review the appearance of the custom line and fill patterns in Visio, but was annoyed that they are only displaying a name without a preview image. I could not find them easily on the web either, so I thought I would list them here, with images. These custom patterns are available in three Microsoft-provided stencils in the Visio Extras category.
In the new normal of social distancing, we can easily miss the nuances of facial expressions with the the various electronic communication platforms that we utilise. In our personal communications via mobile apps, we have all started to use Emojis to express sentiment and actions, although we can sometimes convey the wrong meanings unintentionally as some Emojis get re-purposed by certain sections of society. Microsoft Windows 10 added native support for Emojis a year ago, and they can be inserted into many Microsoft applications using the onscreen keyboard 👀:
Microsoft Visio does have CHAR() and UNICHAR() ShapeSheet functions, just like Excel, but it does not have the inverse CODE() and UNICODE() functions, unlike Excel. However, there is a way to create a formula in the Visio ShapeSheet to provide these functions.
The following worksheet demonstrates how the CHAR(), CODE(), UNICHAR(), and UNICODE() functions work in Excel.
| Column | Formula |
| Index | n |
| Char | =IFERROR( CHAR(INT([@Index])),””) |
| Code | =IFERROR( CODE([@Char]),””) |
| Unichar | =UNICHAR(INT([@Index])) |
| Unicode | =UNICODE([@Unichar]) |
