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Visio for Desktop

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Play Checkers with Visio in Teams

[Update : a new version of this file allows Visio for M365 users to edit/play with see Making Custom Shapes for Visio for M365]

We are all spending more time in Teams or SharePoint nowadays, but not everyone knows that Visio documents can now be shared and collaborated with, and even set as a Teams tab. I was trying to think of a suitable demonstration of the co-working and collaboration possibilities, and came up with a reworking of an earlier post about playing checkers with Visio. Since this previous document was made before Visio for the web, I made some enhancements that work just as well with Visio for desktop and Visio for the web. This article explains a few ShapeSheet customisations that can be developed in Visio for the desktop, but can then be used in Visio for the web. Notice how each player can see which piece was moved by their opponent because their initials are displayed, and this is expanded to the full name if the mouse cursor is hovered over them.

Two players co-working in Visio for the web
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Visio is NOT Vizio!

Update 1 : Microsoft read this post and immediately corrected the spelling so the following now works : https://adoption.microsoft.com/virtual-hub/search/?_sft_vh_product=microsoft-visio 🙂

Update 2 : Mr VisGuy! “spelt” is the same as “spelled” outside USA!

Aarghh! What kind of message is sent out if a company does not know how to spell the name of their own product? There is a make of TV in the States called Vizio, which is not the name of my favourite data-diagramming application, Visio. It may be pronounced the same, but believe me it is totally different. So, it is extremely disappointing that Microsoft have allowed their own product to be spelt incorrectly in the Virtual Hub in the Microsoft Ignite 2020 website.

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Visio now and beyond at Microsoft Ignite 2020

I have presented at the last four Microsoft Ignite conferences and was part way through the world-wide tour when this pandemic began. I was looking forward to visiting New Orleans for this years shindig, but, alas, we are now in a new world where in-person events are a fond memory. Fortunately, Microsoft have the tools to create an engaging online experience, and today I was able to see Mukul and Saurabh bring us all up to speed on on what has been delivered since last year, and what to expect in the next (see Visio – now and beyond ).

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Advanced Installer now Supports Visio VSTO Add-Ins

Advanced Installer now supports creating VSTO Visio Add-Ins installation projects using the Office Add-Ins wizard! This is great news for those of us who are still having to create VSTO Add-Ins, especially since Visual Studio does not include Setup & Deployment projects (again).

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Maximum Size of a Visio Page and Text block

I needed to check the maximum size of Visio pages for a current project of mine, so I devised a simple test with a diamond shape with its vertices pinned automatically to the edge of the Visio page, with text fields inserted in the center. I started with a standard A0 Landscape page, then multiplied the page width and height using the Page Setup dialog…

  • A Metric A0 page
  • A0 width and height x 10
  • A0 width and height x 100
  • A0 width and height x 50
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Using an Updateable Default Font in Visio

I am working on a Visio project where the client wants to be able to configure the font used in each document. These documents have many custom masters, but the user can add there own annotations too. Therefore, I needed to find a way to synchronise the fonts used in both cases. Visio has Themes and Variants, and some of these built-in settings use different fonts, but there is no way of editing the fonts used in each theme since Office 2010 ( see Create a custom theme). There have been many questions on the web about changing the default font used in Visio, which is currently Calibri, but there were no easy answers found. Visio used to use Styles rather than Themes, and these capabilities are still there, but the buttons are not displayed in the default ribbon. However, the Drawing Explorer window does show the Styles and their hierarchies.

  • No Theme applied
  • Retrospect theme applied
  • Organic theme applied
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