Still in lockdown on holiday, so I thought I would create a version of backgammon that can be played with Visio for the web. This was inspired by my original Visio tutor, the late David Edson, who created a Visio backgammon document which included macros. Macros are not available in Visio for the web, so I have created one where the dice can be shaken, the doubling cube changed, and the pieces reset, using nothing but ShapeSheet formulas.
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Play Chess with Visio in Teams
[Update : a new version of this file allows Visio for M365 users to edit/play with see Making Custom Shapes for Visio for M365]
Following on from my last article about playing checkers with Visio in Teams, I decided that I should also revisit my earlier Visio chessboard to make it work in Visio online. I have implemented the ability to automatically reset the positions before a new game, and I have made a single chess piece shape that can be either colour or icon.
Play Checkers with Visio in Teams
[Update : a new version of this file allows Visio for M365 users to edit/play with see Making Custom Shapes for Visio for M365]
We are all spending more time in Teams or SharePoint nowadays, but not everyone knows that Visio documents can now be shared and collaborated with, and even set as a Teams tab. I was trying to think of a suitable demonstration of the co-working and collaboration possibilities, and came up with a reworking of an earlier post about playing checkers with Visio. Since this previous document was made before Visio for the web, I made some enhancements that work just as well with Visio for desktop and Visio for the web. This article explains a few ShapeSheet customisations that can be developed in Visio for the desktop, but can then be used in Visio for the web. Notice how each player can see which piece was moved by their opponent because their initials are displayed, and this is expanded to the full name if the mouse cursor is hovered over them.
Creating PowerPoint Presentations automatically from Visio
Visio Plan 2 has a great, but flawed, feature called Slide Snippets, that can create PowerPoint presentations automatically from any number of titled rectangles, on any number of pages in a Visio document. However, it usually creates distorted images, and it does not automatically contain any descriptive text or hyperlinks. I have previously described how the distortions can be manually fixed (see Manual Fix for Slide Snippets in Visio Plan 2 ), but that is tedious, so I have written a Visio add-in, SS Plus, to not only fix the image, but also allow hyperlinks to be added to it, and to include descriptive text that can include bold, italics and hyperlinks … and can be automatically converted into SmartArt layouts!
If you want to read more then please go to SS Plus to learn how you can try it for free!
Bi-directional Labels on Off-Page Grid References
I have previously written about using off-page references and labelled page grids in Visio, see A Page Grid with Labels and Page Grids and Off Page References, however a reader pointed out that the label on the Off-Page Reference shape is duplicated on both ends. This is not always ideal, however it is all I could do using just ShapeSheet formulas alone. So, in this article, I show how a VBA macro can enhance the reciprocal labels on the twin Off-Page Reference shapes, and they automatically update if either end is moved between grids. This is especially useful in electrical wiring diagrams, but the principal can be adapted for other purposes.
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Visio Data Visualizer Tips
The Microsoft Visio product team have released a great video introduction to the Visio Data Visualizer, but even that does not reveal all of its power. So, here are some tips about using the Microsoft Visio Data Visualizer add-in in Excel. Firstly, the add-in currently offers three different types of diagram, and each have a number of alternative layout arrangements.
- Basic Flowchart – 4 layouts
- Cross-Functional Flowchart – 5 layouts
- Organization Chart – 5 layouts
Although these are the proposed diagram types, there is no reason why other types of data, such as network devices, cannot be used with any of them.
