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ShapeSheet Formulas

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More secrets of the Visio Legend shape

I was going to do a full post on the special Legend shape in Visio that can automatically count instances of masters on a page, then I found that my good friend Chris Roth, aka VisGuy, had done one some years ago ( see visguy.com/…/legend-shapes). However, I have some extra information that will assist in getting the functionality to work consistently.
Basically, you can make any Master work with the Legend shape by adding the User.visLegendShape = 2 setting into a Master shape, but there are caveats.

  1. If the name of a Master is changed, then any existing shapes on the page must be re-placed
  2. The BaseID of each Master must be unique
  3. If the BaseID is changed (using NewBaseID), then any existing shapes on the page must be re-placed

To demonstrate this, I used the Good and Bad icon shapes from the Legend Shapes stencil.

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A Blackstar alphabet in Visio

I wrote an article last year for Microsoft, using Visio to explain some bits of messaging and encryption (see Musings on MVP Open Day 2016 at Bletchley Park.pdf ). I finished the article with an unexplained image of a word, well the solution was obviously “BOWIE”, as written on the cover of his final album, Blackstar, released exactly one year ago today.

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US State Flags for Visio

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:

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New book available for pre-order : Mastering Data Visualization with Microsoft Visio Professional 2016

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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

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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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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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