I am working on a project where I thought the US State flags might be useful, so I quickly created a new master shape from the images in Wikipedia. The shape simply provides a selection of one of the states from the Shape Data window (plus one extra for the reverse of Oregon’s flag!).
The flag shape has a couple of Shape Data rows:
I have a new book on Visio coming out in June called Mastering Data Visualization with Microsoft Visio Professional 2016. It covers the ins and outs of data with Visio!
Please visit http://bit.ly/1SeVfwW for more information.
Packt Publishing are currently running a deal on my last book, Microsoft Visio 2013 Business Process Diagramming and Validation , until 12th April 2016:
Follow this link : 1LHNDwI
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.
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:
I will be venturing to the dark side of the moon on Saturday 12th September 2015 at SQL Saturday in Cambridge, UK ( see http://www.sqlsaturday.com/411/EventHome.aspx ).
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.
