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
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.
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/ ).
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:
I have recently been demonstrating how to automatically drop data point shapes into the correct latitude \ longitude position over a map image in Visio, and in this instalment I show how to automatically filter the dropped data points by a rectangular area. This will only work after calibrating the map image as in my previous article http://blog.bvisual.net/2015/05/26/calibrating-a-map-in-visio/ and then using the Data Point shape (or similar) from http://blog.bvisual.net/2015/05/27/distributing-data-points-automatically-on-maps-in-visio/
The principles of reading the Shape Data value from a selected shape to automatically drop rows from the active External Data window using the selected master shape could be applied to many scenarios.
In my last article, I described how to calibrate a map in Visio ( see http://blog.bvisual.net/2015/05/26/calibrating-a-map-in-visio/ ), and in this article I use a calibrated map to distribute data points from a linked data source automatically.
For this example, I drew a simple shape at the size that I want, but you could add this smartness to any shape. All you need is an external data recordset that contains the Latitude and Longitude values that need to be linked to each data point.
