bVisual

Shape Design

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Displaying the Fill and Line Section Values of a shape

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.

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Using Visio Professional 2016 Text Callouts, Icon Sets and Data Bars to display data directly

Last year, I blogged about using the master shapes used in Data Graphics in Visio 2013 Professional for displaying data directly, rather than embedded in other shapes as graphic items. Now that Visio Professional 2016 is released, and because there have been some improvements to the graphics, especially for Text Callouts, I have created stencils from the new masters, with some slight changes as outlined in my earlier articles. As before, the stencils can be downloaded into the My Shapes folder, from where they will be available for use at any time. These stencils are freely available to anyone with a Visio Professional 2016 license.

Text Callouts

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Improving the legend of multi-data Data Graphic items in Visio

Data Graphics in Visio Professional (and Premium) are a great way of surfacing the information in each shape, but it can be easy to forget what the Color By Value, Icon Sets or Data-bars represent:

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Using multiSelect in Visio

I have had some comments that the diagram in my previous post ( see http://blog.bvisual.net/2015/11/16/data-import-and-export-features-in-visio-2016-and-2013/ ) was a little hard to follow. May I suggest my free multiSelect add-in can help?  ( see http://blog.bvisual.net/2012/07/20/multiple-selection-methods-for-visio-diagrams/ ).

In the following screenshot from Visio 2016 with multiSelect installed, I have selected the Data \ Custom Import feature shape. This makes the multiSelect ribbon tab visible,  and I have ticked Options \ Pan and Zoom, and I am about to click the Shape Selection \ Parents button.

A Visio diagram with lots of connected shapes
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Formatting Shape Data in Visio

One of the best aspects of Visio is the ability of shapes to hold data, and the easiest way to do this is to define rows of Shape Data. Each row can be defined as holding one of eight different types, and most of these can have their values formatted for display. In this article I discuss the formatting of these values, using either ShapeSheet functions or automation methods. The driver for this is my on-going frustration with the Microsoft provided standard Shape Data window because of its shortcomings … for example, its lack of multi-line support even though it can hold 64k characters in each row, and its lack of a time control, even though it can store dates and time.

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