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 ).
Visualising SharePoint and SQL Data with Visio Professional
Visio
Formatting Shape Data in Visio
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.
My first Office Mix … and it’s about visViewer
As I have been using PowerPoint a fair bit recently, I noticed a template for Microsoft Office Mix. It lead me to install a free PowerPoint add-in that enables me to add optional audio and video to the presentation before uploading to the Mix website ( see https://mix.office.com/ ).
At first, I didn’t realise that my voice was being recorded, so I did it again … but maybe I should keep my mouth shut!
You can see my initial efforts at : https://mix.office.com/watch/1xf8jyin4s364
Microsoft Visio 2013 Themes
Visio supports Microsoft Office themes with their variants, and I have been experimenting with their affect on data graphics, so I thought I would create a document with examples of each theme applied to some data graphics. I would hesitate before using some of these, but it is interesting to see the appearance of each.
SQL Saturday Business Intelligence Special in Edinburgh
We had a fantastic weekend in Edinburgh where I presented Visio as a BI solution for SQL professionals at SQL Saturday. I volunteered because, quite frankly, I do not think that Microsoft promote Visio for BI enough, even though they have put in the BI domain for Microsoft partner competencies. This was a community event, so many thanks to all of the sponsors for enabling it, the many volunteers for running around, and especially to Jen Stirrup for organising it ( see http://jenstirrup.com/2015/06/15/jens-pass-diary-sqlsaturday-edinburgh-my-heartfelt-thanks-go-to/ ).
Adam Velo, a fellow MVP, took this photo of me, and he followed up with an excellent presentation about the psychology of data graphics (see http://blog.crmguru.co.uk/ ).
Dropping and Connecting Linked Data Shapes in Visio
I like linking data to shapes in Visio. It saves time in filling in Shape Data and adding text, or any Data Graphic to them. Basically I am lazy, and I also like to create macros for repetitive tasks, so in this blog I provide two macros to save the drudgery of two tasks I do so often:
- Dropping and data linking a number of items from an External Data recordset filtered by values in a column or columns
- Connecting shapes together following a parent-child relationship between Shape Data values