Microsoft recently retired Visio Viewer 2002 and 2003, and forced a security patch of Visio Viewer 2007. This affected my free visViewer wrapper application. Therefore, I have updated my visViewer application, which you can download from http://www.bvisual.net/Products/visViewer.aspx .
And yes, I will soon be creating a 3rd edition to work with Visio Viewer 2010!
A recent newsgroup post asked recently why the Wall shape in his floor plans continued to show feet and inches, even after he had changed the measurement units of the page to millimeters. At first, I though he must be wrong because when I created a new Metric Floor Plan, where the walls do display millimeters by default, and then I changed the measurement units to feet and inches; I saw that the display did change. Admittedly, the display is feet and decimal inches, but it changed…. Well, I couldn’t resist the challenge to find a simple solution.
Then I created a new US Units Floor Plan and observed that the shape has US Units Shape Data drop down values.
[Read more…] about Displaying Metric Units in US Units Floor Plans
By now, some of you will have downloaded the Visio 2010 Beta, and may even have downloaded the Visio Automation Reference and ShapeSheet Reference files. You may the, like me, wondered how to actually view the contents of these two hxs files? Well, fortunately, Stephanie Horn from the Visio team at Microsoft as able to help, so I thought that I would pass it on to you. (Remember these files are still beta, but they do contain some useful information).
Once you download and unpack the files, you will end up with two files called Visio2010AutoRef.hxs and Visio2010ShapeSheetRef.hxs. You can view them with any HxS viewer, but the download site suggests replacing the existing versions of these files and viewing them through Visio help. To do this:
1. Rename the files VISIO.DEV.HXS and VISIO.SHAPESHEET.HXS, respectively, and put them in your Office141033 directory (i.e., C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice141033).
2. Open Visio, and launched help (F1).
3. Pick “Developer Reference” or “Visio ShapeSheet Help” in the Search pull-down menu.
I suggest turning on “Show Table of Contents” using the book icon in the toolbar, so you can navigate through the help topics.
One of the greatest benefits of being an MVP is our chance to participate in private beta tests of the forthcoming versions of our chosen application. Well, I have been testing the new version of Visio for a while now, and blogging about parts that we have been able to talk publicly about. I think Visio 2010 is going to be a tremendous step forward for enterprises, so it feels good to announce that anyone can download the beta of Visio 2010 Premium edition now … just follow the link on this button:
For me, the highlights are:
There are many improvements behind the scenes to support these new features. Try it out for yourself!
In my previous post, I began to explore the new Validation objects in the Visio 2010 Technical Preview, an I used some VBA code to do this. Well, I have now uploaded the code to OneDrive ( bVisualValidationExplorer.vss ), so that you can use it too! So, this post is about using this code …
First, download the stencil and save it to you My Shapes folder (if you trust me). This will make it available to you to use in any Visio 2010 document.
Then, whenever you want to use the code, simply open the stencil from the More Shapes / My Shapes category….
The stencil will be docked with the other shape stencils, but, of course, this stencil does not have any shapes … only VBA code.
The Microsoft Visio team recently blogged about Creating custom validation rules for Visio 2010 , in which it was suggested that we can use Visual Basic for Applications to interact with the new validation API. I thought, there’s a challenge … so I will develop a VBA project to do just that. I will upload the code soon, but, as it is only half developed today, I will demonstrate how to understand why a rule has been broken.
In the following BPMN diagram, I have failed to connect a Task to the End Event. I have made it obvious here but it could be easy to overlook in a larger diagram. In fact, I know of one company who were advised by a “consultant” that there must be something wrong when the end of a connector goes red therefore you should move it away from the shape until it goes green! The result was that the company had over 300 flow diagrams without a single valid connection! That company is no more!
