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Visio 2013

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Creating a Schema from Visio External Data record sets

Visio introduced External Data record sets in 2007, and I have made great use of them ever since. Visio 2013 has deprecated reverse engineering of databases to produce a schema, which was a function that I loved to use because it allowed me to provide clients with up to date, annotated, enhanced schema diagrams. Microsoft have, however, provided some nice database schema templates in Visio 2013 Professional, so I thought I would provide a way to use the External Data record sets to produce schema diagrams.

I have created a new custom stencil, based upon the IDEF1X Database Notation template in Visio 2013 Professional, and have added some macros to provide the guided diagramming. I say guided because page position of tables and relationships are left to you, but the macros will create table definitions from External Data record sets.

All of the three database notation templates contain an Entity and an Attribute master. In fact, they also have a Primary Key Attribute master too, but this is identical to the Attribute master, apart from a setting to say it is the primary key. This can be done from the Attribute shape anyway, so I will dispense with the Primary Key Attribute master.

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Mapping SharePoint List Columns to Visio Shape Data Types

The shape data in Visio 2013 diagrams can be linked to many external data sources, and one of the most useful is a SharePoint List. However, the Shape Data rows have a smaller number of expected data types than the column types that are available in SharePoint. This article begins an exploration of the mapping of SharePoint list column types to Visio data types.

The Type cell of a Shape Data row defines the data type, which is a number from 0 to 7, that is stored in that row.

Data TypeDescription
0String
1Fixed List
2Number
3Boolean
4Variable List
5Date or Time
6Duration
7Currency

The Format cell can modify the display of Value, or can provide the option values for the two list types.

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New Visio book out now!

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.

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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.

VisioAtWork-Oslo

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 .

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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