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Creating a Custom Org Chart Template with Extra Properties

A Visio user recently asked how to add a salary amount for an Org Chart person automatically, based on their selected Level. I thought it was a bit long to answer in the forum, so I have written my answer below. It demonstrates how you can have your own custom template that works with the Organization Chart add-on in Visio.

My approach to creating a custom template that still uses the Organization Chart Add-On is to create a new drawing from the built-in template, and then to add extra properties to it.

First, select Show Document Stencil to view all of the local copies of the built-in master shapes. If they are not there, then simply drag and drop them from the built-in stencil on to the first page, and then delete the shapes on the page. This will not delete the local copies of the masters.

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Visio Date Format Pictures Affect Data Entry via the Calendar Popup

I have been creating roadmaps in Visio lately, and the client is only concerned with the months and years, so I thought it would be sensible to use a Date Format Picture to display only the month and year in the Shape Data window. What I did not expect is that the mere existence of this Date Format Picture would alter the actual date stored in the cell. In this blog, I layout my concerns about the Calendar popup that is provided for Date type Shape Data rows.

In the following example, I have created a shape, coloured pale orange below, and added 25 Date type Shape Data rows. I have not applied any format to Property1, but then I have applied each of the 17 suggested Date Format Patterns provided on a drop-down list in the Define Shape Data dialog. Finally, I added a further 7 patterns manually. I then selected Today as the value for every single Shape Data row:

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Adding the Sixth Legend Icon in Visio 2010

In my previous two articles, I described how to have 6 icons in a Data Graphic Icon Set, and provided some VBA code to make your own icons sets from existing Visio shapes or images. One thing that I overlooked was the Insert Legend command in Visio 2010, because it does not add the sixth icon automatically, so this blog describes how to add it. As a side effect, the code also enables the legend labels of icon and CBV (Color By Value) items to be edited.

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When you use the Insert Legend command, it examines the Data Graphics used on the active page, to create legends for each Icon Set or Color By Value settings that it finds. Closer examination of the legend shapes, shows that an instance of the Icon Set master shape is added for each of the icons found.

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Make Your Own Visio Data Graphic Icons Sets … automatically

In my last post, I showed how you can actually have up to six icons in a Visio Data Graphics Icon Set ( see How to have six icons in a Visio Data Graphic Icon Set/ ), and I finished by saying that I would now show how to create new icon sets from existing shapes … automatically. In fact, I will show you how to do it with existing SmartShapes or with images.

I was asked to make KPI icons from six weather images:

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How to have six icons in a Visio Data Graphic Icon Set

I was recently asked to represent the values of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in Visio. Great, I thought, this is just what Visio’s Data Graphic Icon Sets are for! Only trouble was, that there were six possible values for the KPI, but all the example Icon Sets have a maximum of five icons in them. So, I had to come up with a way of displaying six icons …

In the following example, I have defined a Shape Data row with a Fixed List type that can have a value from the list “3;2;1;-1;-2;-3”

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I applied the Faces Icon Set, and set icons for each value, except for –1:

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Proud to be an MVP again…

I have seen several blog posts by former MVPs who have questioned the value of their past award, or the attitude of Microsoft to their specialization. I have been a Visio MVP for a few years now, and I have just been re-awarded for another year, and I can only say that I have always enjoyed the interaction with the product team at Microsoft, and have felt that they have listened to us MVPs. I am sure that there are pressures from other parts of Microsoft on them, and they may not be able to deliver all that they would like to.

I have attended the annual MVP conference regularly, and have met many MVPs who are far more knowledgeable than me about IT in general, but then there was no Computer Science degrees when I was at college. People of my age didn’t have the opportunity to study IT in our youth … it just didn’t exist as a discipline. People of my age had to move into IT from other disciplines at a later date. In my case, I moved over from architecture, as did several of the original Visio folks that I met back in 1997 at my first Visio conference … pre-Microsoft. Hopefully, my lack of a pure IT background is made up for by a pragmatic approach to the use of IT in business.

I was using Unix CAD and database systems for a few years before the prevalence of Windows in corporations forced me to move over to the other side of the fence. I am glad I did, because the flexibility and power of Visio has kept my little grey cells busy for quite a long time now.  I have seen imitators come and go, but Visio has remained. I have seen Microsoft dominate the desktop; bank-roll Apple to keep the competition alive; dabble with the tablet PC; then see Apple re-present it in a form that redefined expectations. The connected world is at last becoming a reality, and this has caused a paradigm shift that Microsoft are having to accommodate.

Microsoft have to maintain their millions of users on board as they navigate through these choppy waters. It is perhaps inevitable that some people are lost overboard, and it may be that the course has to be re-chartered along the way, but I am currently confident that there is a place, and a need, for Visio, as the foremost data graphics visualization application, in business.

And my little cells will have something to get greyer with …