bVisual

ShapeSheet Formulas

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Interactive Demographics of the European Union in Visio

I was recently contacted by a reader, Stanley M. Max (Towson University lecturer), who had started creating a Visio map of the 27 countries in the European Union in 2020, along with the demographics culled from Wikipedia. He wanted to know if the map and stats could be combined to make a more appealing presentation. Well, that prompted me to not only combine the data and country shapes, but to explore ways in which a presentation of the map can be made more interesting in Visio. So, I added data and hyperlinks to the shapes, and set up a page property for the selected country which automatically highlights the country shape, statistics, and header, to which I added flags. So, the user can either set the page country using the Shape Data window for the page, or context menu of each country, or simply by double-clicking.

  • The original Visio page
  • The original Excel table
  • The enhanced Visio page
  • A country selected for the page
  • Adding Slide Snippets
  • Exported to PowerPoint
  • Export to Word previews
  • Exported to Word
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Understanding Visio Data Graphic’s Color by Value

The desktop Visio editions, Visio Professional and Visio Plan 2, have a great way of automatically displaying data as Data Bars, Icon Sets, Text Callouts and Color by Value. The first three types of Data Graphics require sub-shapes to be inserted into each shape that they are applied to, but the last one, Color by Value (CBV), merely requires some User-defined Cells and formulas. However, unlike the first three, there can be only one Shape Data value displayed as colours in each Data Graphic (DG). So, how can we easily update the colour assigned to each value using code, rather than manually using the manual dialogs provided?

  • One Data Graphic with 4 CBVs
  • The first in the list is applied
  • Numeric data can have two types of CBV
  • Locating the Data Graphic master
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Pushing Data Visualizer in Visio beyond its limits

My last post was about some of the lessons learnt when trying to push Data Visualizer to its limits, but this one has some ways of overcoming these limitations. The main lesson learnt is that DV binds the shapes within the DV container shape, CFF Data Visualizer, and controls some of the ShapeSheet cells that are normally available for customization. The label of the connector is bound to the respective column in the Excel table, and that, combined with the ability to modify the Dynamic connector master shape provides a way of overcoming some of the limitations discovered.

So, given that we want to use DV, and we need to have multiple flows between the same shapes, then they cannot be separate connectors. We need to combine multiple flows onto the same connector, and then find a way to selectively display different flows somehow by controlling the visibility of the connectors. However, we cannot make them invisible because they will be deleted by DV, so we need to control their transparency instead. We can do this by interpreting the label somehow, and we are going to modify the Dynamic connector to react to the text of the label, and we can also change the colour and line pattern too.

The following screenshots show the Excel table with the multiple flows between the same shapes concatenated with pipe characters, and the diagram created by Data Visualizer when this table is imported into a custom template using Data \ Create from Data \ Create:

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Pushing Data Visualizer in Visio to the limits!

Regular readers of my blog will know that I like to use the Data Visualizer (DV) in Visio Plan 2, but I recently tried to help a user who really decided to push it to the limits. In this scenario, there were multiple connections, but with different labels, being created between the same flowchart shapes, and the plea was how to make it work! Well, I experimented with this, and found that DV does not really work well in this way, and then proposed an alternative approach, which I will explain in this article.

First, I will show how it fails by setting up an Excel table that does contains multiple connections, but fails to update the labels consistently.

Excel Table with Multiple Links
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Setting Theme defaults in Visio

I was recently asked how to change the default font size and line weight in Visio, and then saw then many others are asking the same sort of question. I found one reasonable answer suggesting that you should create a new document from your required template, then edit the Styles to suit, and then save as a new personal template. Well, I am not sure I like that answer because it means you must create a duplicate template for each one you use. So, I decided to see if I could find a better way…

Firstly, it is important to know that these default settings are not editable for the whole Visio application, because they are stored in each document, under the Styles collection. You can view the Styles in a document using the Drawing Explorer window that can be opened from the Developer tab.

Select Define Styles in the Drawing Explorer window
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Taking Visio Actions Rows to the limit

I recently (re-)discovered that there is a limit to the number of Actions section rows that will be evaluated for display on the right mouse menu of a Visio shape. I have not hit a limit (yet) for the number of rows that can be added to the Actions section … so why is there a limitation to the number that will be displayed on the right mouse menu? In Visio for desktop, any rows over this limit will simply not be displayed, but in Visio for web it prevents any Actions from being displayed at all on the shape.

  • Visio for desktop evaluates the first 50 Actions
  • Visio for web can only display 49 Actions
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