Visio has had a Number Shapes add-on for many years, even since before Microsoft bought the application in 2000. The add-on autmatically creates three Shape Data rows to hold the number, any prefix text, and a value to indicate whether the shape number text should be shown. It is useful, but it can also be very annoying if you also want to label your shapes, such as with process flow shapes, or you want the shape number to be displayed outside of the main shape. Fortunately, there is a solution….
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Testing Visio shape text for WCAG 2.0 pass
The Web Content Access Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 provides the current recommendations for making web content accessible to users with vision impairment, but how do you test if your Visio shapes pass? There are several web sites out there that provide this capability, but all of them require the HEX values, rather than the RGB or HSL that Visio provides natively. Therefore, I have created a Visio callout shape that can be associated with a target shape to report on the values of each of its main color elements and provides hyperlinks to automatically check the contrast ratio on WebAIM.
The colour formats that can be selected from either the Shape Data window or the right mouse menu are:
Multi-line text in Visio Shape Data
The Shape Data (nee Custom Properties) dialog and window only provides a single line to view or edit text values. It is a great shame because the value can be up to 64k characters, and long text can be pasted into it. I, and many others, have complained about this for many years to Microsoft, but nothing has been done to rectify this. Of course, I do develop custom user interface components for many customers, but that is not always desirable. Therefore I sometimes re-purpose standard Visio elements to provide the ability to view or edit multi-line text in Shape Data rows.
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Writing a WeekNum(…) function for Visio
I needed to display the week number of dates in a Visio project of mine, but there is no WeekNum(…) function built-in, so I had to write one, and allow for the date that the week numbers begin in to be varied from 1st January. I also needed to allow for the week numbers to go backwards from the specified week number begin date.
Excel has a WeekNum(..) function, which can take an optional parameter for the day of the week to begin on, and an IsoWeekNum(..) function, and the following table shows the values change for the first 35 days of the year:
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Narrated Text in Visio for Accessibility
One of the ways that Visio supports accessibility is to provide text that is read out by a screen reader, such as Windows Narrator or JAWS. This Alt Text can be set using Format Shape / Size & Properties tab using the Title and Description text boxes. The Title is the initial text that is read out when a shape is attentioned, and the Description will only read out if the user pauses. The Description text box only allows 255 characters to be entered and displayed, but this is not actually the limit!
Prototyping Visio ShapeSheet Formulas in Excel
I am working on an application where the horizontal axis of the Visio page represents dates from left to right. In fact, the each of the fixed horizontal grids are 1 day, and I need to have shapes that understand the begin date at the left edge of the shape, and the end date at the right edge of the shape. There is, therefore, a number of elapsed days representing by the width of the shape. However, the underlying grid can either represent all days, or it can be changed to only represent weekdays by omitting the weekends. I struggled to find the best formula to calculate the elapsed days or weekdays between two dates in Visio ShapeSheet formulas, so I turned to Excel to provide an inspiration. The Visio ShapeSheet is modelled on the Excel worksheet, and formulas can be entered into the cells in much the same way. However, the available functions differ since Excel is mainly used for arithmetic and statistics, but Visio is used for graphics and data. In this article, I demonstrate how I used C# and Excel to construct and test formulas for use in a Visio shape.
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