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Visio

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Protecting the integrity of custom Visio masters

All of my Visio solutions contain custom masters because this is the best way to create smart shapes that respond to user’s needs. This usually means creating Shape Data, User-defined Cells and Action rows that govern aspects of the shape with formulas designed to provide an efficient user interface. As a developer I sometimes forget that other users may not perform the same actions as I do, and can accidently undo all my intended behaviour. For example, in recent testing of a visual stream mapping system that I am working on, my carefully constructed master-shape relationship was being broken by grouping some of them together, thus changing their behavior and hiding them from some of the custom functions. The reason given was to that they want to create copies and this seemed like a reasonable way to do it. Now, I have known that this is bad ever since my original Visio developer training back in 1996, so I always avoid doing this, and erroneously thought that other would know this too. I was wrong to be so myopic, so I explored how I can best prevent this and other user actions that could break the intended master-shape relationship.

  • Multiple instances of a single master shape
  • Locking some properties of the shape
  • Modifying group behaviour
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Docked Stencils in Visio for the Web

Visio desktop has multiple ways to specify the folder where docked stencils can be found, but, as far as I am aware, Visio for the Web only has one. I mostly create VSTO add-ins for Visio desktop, and I use Visio desktop as a studio for creating templates for Visio for the Web. Often, I leave the Document Stencil in the template open because users can then drag and drop from there, but when I create an installation with custom stencils then they normally go into the application folder, or a sub-folder of it. An alternative is to install them into the My Shapes folder in the users desktop Documents folder. These will appear in the Visio desktop UI. Also, there is the ability to set the Stencils folder using File | Options | Advanced | File Locations. Finally, the desktop edition will always first check the folder that the Visio document is in for any docked stencils. Visio for the Web does not have all these options, so how do you get any custom docked stencils to appear when you use Visio for the Web to edit a document?

  • Visio desktop with docked stencils
  • Visio web viewer
  • Visio for the web with missing stencils
  • Visio for the web with stencils
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My Visio Books and Old pre-C# Work

We, as a family, are in the process of de-cluttering our house for hopefully a move closer to the south coast, so I decided to take a photo of my Visio books collection, and as you can see, back in the mid-1990’s, I started reading and learning from other peoples works, and then progressed to writing my own from 2007. This shows how mature the Visio desktop product is, and as very little has been removed, then each book has something to learn.

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Creating Boolean Context Menus in Visio

Over the many, many years that I have been creating Microsoft Visio solutions, I have had to create numerous right-mouse context menus for shapes to control their Shape Data values. Over that time, patterns emerge, so this article is highlighting three different appearances for simple Boolean values, otherwise known as True/False or Yes/No values, and even for tristate Yes/No/Maybe. In fact, Visio presents you with Boolean as one of the eight types of data available on the Define Shape Data dialog, but there is no UI for creating accompanying right-mouse context menus except for the ShapeSheet window. However, I will show that using a Fixed List type is often preferable to a simple Boolean type.

The Define Shape Data dialog
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A visual exploration of Penrose Tiling in Visio

Maybe it is because I used to be a building architect, but I have always been fascinated by the relationship between numbers and visualisations. Perhaps the most famous one is the Golden Ratio which has been used as the basis of many building designs and art pieces. It is often recognised to create a harmony that is universally understood, and is repeatedly found in nature, yet it all boils down to a simple ratio of about 1.618 … and is related to the Fibonacci Numbers. Roger Penrose (re-)discovered shapes based on the Golden Ratio can be arranged aperiodically on an infinite canvas without a repeating pattern. These Penrose Tiling shapes were developed into two groups (P2 and P3) each with two shapes.

There are rules about the arrangement to ensure that they do not fall into a repeatable series. These rules can be followed by ensuring that the ends of the arcs within each shape meet each other. The shapes can be used to try to create an aperiodic pattern of an infinite size, and then a timer can randomly change the colours. It’s a little festive fun!

  • Kites and Darts with Arcs
  • Kites and Darts without Arcs
  • Thick and Thin Rhombi with Arcs
  • Thick and Thin Rhombi without Arcs
  • Patterned Rhombi
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How SVG in Visio can cause a Shape.BoundingBox(…) error

I have used Visio’s Shape.BoundingBox(…) for many, many years and I cannot ever recall it failing, but I have now managed to create some shapes that cause it to error. This caused many hours of confusion, so I nearly abandoned using the method, until I discussed it with my fellow Visio MVP, John Goldsmith (see VisualSignals), and together we examined the cause. It came down to a badly formed sub-shape within the shape that had zero dimension … and in fact had an incomplete ShapeSheet. If you look at the screenshot below, then you may notice that there is no Shape Transform section! That is a mandatory section, and should always exist … so how did this happen?

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