The third video in the MVP Sessions has just been published, and it’s the first one where I do the presentation, rather than the introduction. In this one, I show a few shortcuts to laying out shapes : http://visio.microsoft.com/en-us/Get_Started/How_To/Pages/Get-started-with-shapes.aspx
Enjoy!
It has long been said that Visio’s ShapeSheet was modelled on Excel’s WorkSheet with it’s ability to enter formulae from a set list of functions. Indeed, there is a lot of similarity between some of Visio’s ShapeSheet functions and similar ones found in Excel, however one should exercise some caution and check that the behaviour is as expected. I recently forgot to do this with the NOW() function, and it caused me some grief for a while.
I had constructed a Today shape in Visio, and used the NOW() function to position the shape in the horizontal, and to display the date value in a Shape Data row and in the ScreenTip.
In Excel, if you enter the NOW() function into a cell, it immediately evaluates when the formula is entered. So, if you enter the same formula in multiple cells (by typing … not copying), it will evaluate at the time that you enter it. Thus you can apparently have different times displayed.
The first of 24 videos has been released at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTtplW6mJ7fWSIvHScqHCkaA4T0HhaWU-. This one features Scott Helmers doing a tour of templates available in Visio 2010 out-of-the box. I hope you find it useful.
What a week we just had! Microsoft invited three Visio MVPs and book authors to record 24 short videos on Visio. They will be published gradually over the next few months. We converged on Microsoft’s studios in Redmond from Boston, Germany and the UK for two days of intensive filming. It was enlightening, enriching and exhausting. The videos will only be a few minutes long each (apparently most online viewers can only last 90 seconds), but they cover a wide area of Visio uses, and contain a few good productivity tips.
[Read more…] about Visio Video Filming for Future ViewingI like extending Visio with custom code, and I have been doing it a long time. I progressed from VBA within Visio documents, to VB executable, using a C++ wrapper to register as Visio Add-ons, through VB.net COM add-ins to C# VSTO add-ins. Which ever language and method I use, it seems to me that deployment is always far more more difficult than it should be. Even though it has got simpler with VS 2010, there are still some gotchas…
[Read more…] about Deploying a Visio 2007 or 2010 VSTO add-in with Visual Studio 2010
I have been using worksheets and ranges in Excel with Visio’s Link Data to Shapes (in the Pro and Premium editions) for several years, but recently encountered a problem with the recently added structured references in Excel. Fortunately, with the help of my colleague John Goldsmith, we found a solution.
Normally, I create tables in Excel worksheets with the column headings in the first row, so I could use the worksheet name in the Link Data to Shapes function in Visio. However, I wanted to have an extra row above the table headers for a recent project, so I wanted to use named ranges, defined with any rows above the table headers omitted. When I went to connect these ranges using the Data Selector in Visio, I found that all of my named ranges, except one (StepIds), were missing from the list of worksheets and ranges:
