bVisual

Visio 2016

Published on by

Scroll to Capture Visio ShapeSheets with SnagIt

Anyone who develops with Visio faces the problem of viewing the formulas and values in an often difficult to navigate ShapeSheet window. I have been a SnagIt and Camtasia user for many years thanks to the generous free license I get from TechSmith as a Microsoft MVP. I have used both products extensively for my books, articles and videos, though I am not an expert in either product. Now, SnagIt has a panoramic scrolling capture feature that is great with ShapeSheets.
The unique smartness of Visio shapes comes from the ability to program the ShapeSheet behind every single shape. This is like an Excel worksheet divided into sections, and the display can switched between formulas and values. The Visio’s ShapeSheet window does have the ability to toggle the visibility of each section, but that is often not enough to get a complete picture of the formulas involved. The following example is the partial view of the ShapeSheet window for a simple shape.

ViewSections
[Read more…] about Scroll to Capture Visio ShapeSheets with SnagIt

Published on by

Installing 64-bit Visio 2016 Professional

There are times when it is necessary to install the 64 bit versions of Visio (and Office), as described at Choose between the 64-bit or 32-bit version of Office. This article does not really expand on the reasons for using 64 bit Visio, but it basically comes down to file size, especially with very large inserted CAD files. I set up a virtual machine to do some testing, and, as it has been a long time since I had to do this, I accidently installed the 32-bit version first, and so I had to start afresh. Therefore, I thought it might be useful to record the steps I took with the download of Visio Professional 2016 from my.VisualStudio.com/downloads. I have pointed to the link that should be followed.

[Read more…] about Installing 64-bit Visio 2016 Professional

Published on by

MSIgnite 2017 Round-Up for Visio

Well it is over for another year, and what a year it has been for Microsoft Visio! I am exhausted from making 3 presentations and being on the Visio booth for the last 4 days, but it has been worth it just to hear the love people have for Visio, and to see their faces when they see the new features and capabilities!

Key highlights of new features:

[Read more…] about MSIgnite 2017 Round-Up for Visio

Published on by

Anchoring scaled shapes to page corners in Visio

I have read that other users have bemoaned the lack of a anchor to top left, or something similar in Visio, so I thought I would demonstrate the issue, then propose a solution. In particular, there are some master shapes on the Annotations and Title Blocks stencils in the Visio Extras category that you would expect to have this capability, but don’t. Wouldn’t it be useful to have the ability to keep the shape size and anchor position to page bottom left, bottom right, top right or top left? This would mean that the page size or scale could be changed, but the annotations and title blocks could remain anchored.


First, it is important to know that Visio shapes are anchored, by default, to the bottom left of a page (or the shape that they are inside the group of). These values are returned from the formulas in the PinX and PinY cells.
Secondly, the location of the pin within the shape is defined by the formulas in the LocPinX and LocPinY cells, and these are relative to the bottom left corner of the shape.
Then it is just a matter of adding some Actions rows to the ShapeSheet of each master in the Document Stencil. The principle is to utilise the User.AntiScale value to reset the formulas in the Width,  Height, PinX or PinY cells. The User.AntiScale row exists in many Master shapes because it is useful for de-scaling values. It has the formula:

[Read more…] about Anchoring scaled shapes to page corners in Visio

Published on by

Previewing the Visio Custom Visual in PowerBI

It is time to talk about the new Visio custom visual for PowerBI. You may have read about it at Visio Power BI example and Add Visio visualizations to Power BI reports, but I wanted to add my findings. First, it is great to see this feature, but it is not yet the finished article. However, I hope I can show that it can be an extremely useful addition to the business intelligence toolset from Microsoft. I think that the existing Link Data to Shapes and Data Graphics features in Visio desktop are considered to be Operational Intelligence capabilities, whereas this new custom visual for PowerBI is definitely Business Intelligence. This is a different discipline, and I have been developing some guidelines for good practice when using Visio with PowerBI. In this article, I will demonstrate how I created a PowerBI dashboard using graphics and data from last years Microsoft Ignite conference.

VisioExcelPowerBI

Let me set the expectations because I am working with a preview of the Visio custom visual.

[Read more…] about Previewing the Visio Custom Visual in PowerBI

Published on by

Embedding multiple language texts in one document in Visio

A few years ago, I was asked to write an add-in for Visio that could switch the text in each flowchart shape between different languages. The client required 5 different alternate languages to be supported, and they had the same 99 page Visio document copied 5 times, and each time there was an edit to be done, then it had to be repeated in each document. So, I wrote an add-in that allows for multiple language texts and page names to be stored in a single document, and added the optional use of Bing Translator. Well, the Bing Translator is now Microsoft Cognitive Services Text Translator, and my add-in installer needed to be updated for later versions of Visio. I am pleased to say that it now works for all versions of Visio since 2010, and for all languages that Visio supports, and it can be downloaded and tried for 30 days from MultiLanguageText.aspx .

MLT01