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The Visio 2010 MVP Sessions windows app

When the Microsoft marketing machine moved its sights onto the 2013 of Visio, they decided to upload the 24 videos that I, Scott Helmers and Chris Roth did for Visio 2010 to YouTube. YouTube is great, but it is so large that I get lost looking for stuff that I am interested in, so I have created a handy little Windows 8.1 app to bring all of the videos together.

The content is still very relevant for Microsoft Visio 2013, and we cover a wide area of Visio’s capabilities in these short introductory videos. Each one is between 5 and 7 minutes…ish.

You can install the free app from : http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/app/visio-2010-mvp-sessions/60b8e55e-2c64-4563-a349-afa14e47c72b

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Get a handy pdf of the session links : http://blog.bvisual.net/2013/07/08/mvp-sessions-for-getting-started-with-visio-2010/

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eXplore Visio–now a Windows Phone 8 App too

Following on from my last post ( see http://blog.bvisual.net/2014/06/13/introducing-explore-visioa-windows-8-1-app/ ), I have now managed to release the second part of my first Universal App … eXplore Visio, to the Windows Phone Store.

It is free, but contains adverts, and can be downloaded from http://bit.ly/1lDenY0

As with the Windows App, you can view the contents of Visio, without Visio, and there is are links to a variety of Visio resources.

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Introducing eXplore Visio–a Windows 8.1 App

Microsoft recently launched Universal Windows Apps, which offers the prospect of developing apps for Windows and Windows Phone from one code base. They also offered a prize entry for all apps listed before start of June 2014. Well, that was enough for me to try my hand at one, but I failed to hit the prize entry deadline, but have just launched the first part of my Universal App – eXplore Visio for Windows 8.1. This app was supposed to be a simple listing of the contents of the various editions of Visio 2013, but it became slightly more…

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I also wanted to learn more about Windows Azure, so I ambitiously created a Windows SQL Azure database to hold all the information that I gleaned from Visio. I then created a Windows Mobile Service to provide read-only access to the data. At first, I created a .Net back-end, but although I could develop with it locally, I could not get anonymous access from the wild to work … I kept getting a request to enter an unknown user name and login, so I created a JavaScript back-end, and it worked … after I used SQL Management Studio to copy the data from one database to another. Anyway, the .Net back-end does say Preview at the moment.

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The Hidden Master Cells – ShapeKeywords and Copyright

Readers of my blog will know that I often customize Visio masters, but I rarely bother to (re-)set the keywords or copyright. The reason being that I do not like to change the copyright if it has been set by another, and I was not quite sure where the keywords were stored. So, I decided to document them both here for my (and your) future use!

 

Master Keywords

The Keywords textbox on the Master Properties dialog provides you with the opportunity to enter keywords for the master which can be used by the Search function:

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Adding Configure Callout functionality to Visio Callouts

Visio is always improving but sometimes some functionality is hard to find, and gets forgotten about. For example, the Custom callout 1,2 and 3 masters on the Visio Extras \ Callouts stencil have been there for a few years, yet most users do not find them or realise what they can do. They provide the ability for a connected callout shape to display the values, and optional labels, of a target shape. This can be most useful for automatic annotations because they are always up to date. However, Visio recently introduced some new Callout shapes, but this ability is not there by default. In this blog, I show you how to add this useful feature to the new Callouts.

First, let’s look at the older Custom callout shapes, which automatically open a Configure Callout dialog when connected to another shape. This callout invites you to display selected Shape Data rows of the target shape:

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10 years and counting …

I avoided posting this yesterday … just in case it was considered an April Fool’s Day prank … but I am pleased (and relieved) to get my 10 years award as a Microsoft MVP for Visio. This gives me renewed enthusiasm to continue blogging technical articles about Visio. Watch this space …..