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.
[Read more…] about New Visio book out now!Visio
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.
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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 .
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
Visio Map of the World
I have often wanted a Visio map of the world, with countries that can be linked to data. There are a number of Visio country shapes that are available for download on the internet, but they are fairly old, and certainly don’t have an up to date world. For example, South Sudan is currently the newest country in the world (2011), though a lot of resources on the web don’t show it. So, I was relieved to find a good SVG world map at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BlankMap-FlatWorld6.svg?uselang=en-gb . Even better was that each of the shapes are named with the ISO2 code. This meant that I could use Link Data to Shapes to automatically create Shape Data from an Excel worksheet that I put together from various sources.

Note that I had to add Kosovo manually, since it was not on the original map, as it’s status as a country is in dispute. The ISO codes have apparently been temporarily assigned.
[Read more…] about Visio Map of the WorldMVP Sessions for Getting Started with Visio 2010
Back in June 2012, I announced the Microsoft sponsored MVP Sessions for Visio 2010 (see http://blog.bvisual.net/2012/06/29/mvp-sessions-wheel/ ). Well, Visio 2013 has been released since then, so Microsoft have changed the links for the videos. So, I have created a web page to provide access to them: http://www.visiorules.com/gallery/MVPSessions/MVPSessions.htm
I have also created a pdf file with hyperlinks : http://www.visiorules.com/gallery/MVPSessions/MVPSessionsWheel.pdf
