Last day of 2014, and the last of my word and number games in Visio … this is Scrabbled, which is a trainer for Scrabble. Okay, it was too difficult to do a fully working Scrabble board without code, and I was likely to break copyright if I did, so I invented a game with the Scrabble tile rack.
I have some suggested rules, but you can make your own up … I just wanted to see what I could do with just ShapeSheet functions..
The holidays are almost over, so I now present my Yahtzee game in Visio just using ShapeSheet formulas …. no VBA or add-in! Pretty soon, I will have a whole compendium of games, but I think this is my most complete yet. Yahtzee is very similar to Poker Dice, but we used to play Yahtzee a lot as kids, so maybe I am regressing. Anyway, setting these games up in Visio demonstrates the power of the ShapeSheet functions, which is necessary for the creation of efficient Visio shapes. I have also made the Dice Racks into List containers that can only hold the Die List Item shapes.
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.
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.
I added a Face Up Shape Data row so that the suit and value are hidden by the Microsoft Office logo.
[Read more…] about A Visio Deck of CardsMicrosoft Visio Professional has had the ability to quickly visualize shape data with data graphics for a while now. This data can be displayed as Text, Data Bar, Icon Set or Color By Value. In an earlier article ( see http://blog.bvisual.net/2014/08/21/using-icon-sets-shapes-to-display-shape-data-values/ ), I showed how to enable the shapes in the Icon Sets stencil to be linked to data. Well, I had a similar request recently for the Data Bar shapes. However, Microsoft did not package the Data Bar shapes into a handy stencil, so I have done this for you.
Firstly, a reminder of the thirteen built-in Data Bar shapes that are available to you when you choose to display data as a Data Graphics / Data Bar:
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In August, I wrote about Using JavaScript to Display Visio Shape Data and Hyperlinks in SharePoint Content Editor ( see http://blog.bvisual.net/2014/08/16/using-javascript-to-display-visio-shape-data-and-hyperlinks-in-sharepoint-content-editor/ ), so now I have added the ability to select shapes by a property value. The main advantage of using JavaScript in the client is that there is no need to go back to the server to refresh the page.
In the following screenshot, I have used the standard web part connections between the BeSmart Ltd document library view and the Visio Web Access control in order to set the Drawing URL.
