Visio

Published on January 27, 2014 by David Parker

Visio Map of the World Update

My earlier post about the world in Visio shapes, see http://blog.bvisual.net/2013/08/16/visio-map-of-the-world/ , has been one of my most popular, and a reader recently asked about changing the colour of countries by data not in my original worksheet, and another asked about adding labelled dots.

Well, at first, I thought it would be quite simple to add more Data Graphics with the Color By Value that I already had, but then I realised that I needed to adjust some of the shapes that I had created from SVG in my previous article.

The problem is that some of the country shapes which were converted from SVG have geometry at the top group level. This means that any Data Graphic items, other than Color By Value, are actually sub-shapes of the group and will be hidden by the country shape itself. That is probably why the Data Graphics task, on the selected Afghanistan shape below, sent the AF label over to the right of it, whereas all the group shapes with all their geometry in sub-shapes, such as the AE (United Arab Emirates) shape, placed the label in its centre.

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Published on December 23, 2013 by David Parker

Making the Off-Page Reference Hyperlink URL Safe

One of my favourite shapes in Visio is the Off-page reference shape on the Basic Flowchart Shapes stencil. I have written about this shape before ( see http://blog.bvisual.net/2011/09/02/page-grids-and-off-page-references/ ) but I did not notice a slight issue with it previously, so this article show how to overcome a couple of issues that I discovered whilst working on a project recently.

The shape is so useful for creating links between different pages and shapes within a Visio document (and can even be used to link between Visio documents), but it achieves this is a couple of ways. When dropped on to a page, it runs an add-on to prompt for the creation of a paired shape on an existing or new page.

Published on November 28, 2013 by David Parker

New Visio book out now!

After the trip to Hyderabad for the Visio MVP Conference, as described in my previous post, my wife and I went to Bangalore, Vadodara, and Mumbai. This gave me the chance to drop-in on Packt Publishing because this is the week that my new book is published ( see http://www.packtpub.com/microsoft-visio-2013-business-process-diagramming-and-validation/book ). The book’s title is Microsoft Visio 2013 Business Process Diagramming and Validation, and, although this is an update to my 2010 book (with an extra chapter for integration with Office365 and SharePoint 2013), it should resonate with a wider audience because Microsoft decided to merge the Premium and Professional editions into one Professional edition for Visio 2013, so that it now includes Visio Services and Validation. This means that there are millions more Visio users who can take advantage of validation rules to ensure that they have well-constructed diagrams in Visio. I would also like to stress that validation rules can be applied to all types of diagrams, not just process diagrams, and I will demonstrate this over the next few months here.

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Published on November 28, 2013 by David Parker

The First MVP Conference in Hyderabad, India

Back in February this year, I reported on the Visio MVPs in Redmond (see http://blog.bvisual.net/2013/02/ ).Well one thing that we learnt back then was that Microsoft had started the transition of the Visio Engineering to Hyderabad in India. Later, Microsoft also announced that the MVP Summits were going to be changed from spring to fall (or autumn if you are not North American). So, this year was to be exceptional because there was going to be two MVP Summits whilst the transition took place. That left the new Visio team in a bit of a quandary : where to hold the fall summit? Redmond, with the rest of the MVP community, or Hyderabad, with just the Visio product team? I was delighted that they took the brave step of holding it in Hyderabad, whilst the rest of the MVPs went to Redmond last year.

Published on September 12, 2013 by David Parker

Visio Day in Oslo

I was honoured to be invited to present at a Microsoft hosted event in Oslo yesterday about Visio and Business Intelligence … or is it Intelligent Business?

I presented a few examples of work that we have undertaken for clients around the world, from process flows in Australia, to road maps and fault tree analysis in UK, to network equipment cabinet layouts internationally, and global WAN diagrams.

Although I have been teaching Visio Services around Europe for the last 18 months, I was keen to demonstrate that Visio can be used for more than BI dashboards in SharePoint, and a little bit of customisation can go a long way.

I was very impressed by the a demo of PowerView, even if it was in Norwegian.

A special thanks to Thomas Bjørgan from Cenika for his presentation, see a demo of their Visio application Centech Draw below .

Published on August 16, 2013 by David Parker

Visio World Time Zones

My last post about a world map inspired me to find a time zone map that could be used in Visio. I found an SVG map at

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Standard_time_zones_of_the_world_%282012%29.svg that I could convert, and link a list of time zones from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_zones_by_UTC_offset that I put into Excel.

I have used Visio’s Color By Value Data Graphics, so you can easily edit the colour scheme.

You can download this map from WorldTimeZones.vsdx