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Visio Online

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My session @ MSIgnite about Visio and PowerBI

Well, that is the first day of MSIgnite over, and I am looking forward to hearing more about the roadmap for Visio today. I presented my session yesterday in a theater that seats 50 but 1,000 had registered for. In the end, the space was so full, I had no idea how many were there, but it was a lot! ( View my session on YouTube / View a 360 image)

DJP_Session_Action


I will be on the Visio booth now for a lot of the time during the conference, so please come talk to me about the possibilities of Visio solutions and integration with other Office applications and Office365. Microsoft have some cool demos of Visio / 3D Mixed Reality, Visio / MSFlow and, of course, Visio / PowerBI.
My book publishers have kindly provided some discounts for the duration of the conference:

  • eBook Discount: 50%Code – MDVMP50
  • Print Discount: 15%Code – MDVMP15
  • Valid until September 30th 2018
  • Go to packtpub.com

In addition, we will be offering the chance to win a copy of mine and Scott Helmers’ book “Microsoft Visio 2016 Step by Step” on the booth.

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Temporary Fix for Data Refresh in Visio Click-2-Run

Visio is an enormous application with literally millions of lines of code, so it is inevitable that bugs creep in for time to time, and can lay dormant .. until you really need it! Such an incident happened to me during a project for a large organisation where the latest and greatest build and versions are held up by the internal IT departments until they are sure that there is absolutely nothing hidden inside. In this project, I was given a laptop with Visio Pro for Office 365 to work with … not a problem, even though that moniker already told me that this was a seriously out of date edition, since it has been called Visio Online Plan 2 for quite a while. Anyway, I developed a solution that relies heavily on linked SharePoint lists and document libraries, using a view. The automatic name of these views are very verbose, so I consistently renamed them. Also, I had the same SharePoint Document library view linked more than once, so that I could link multiple rows to shapes, so renaming was, and is, absolutely essential. Several weeks went by, and my solution was working fine, until one day last week, my colleague told me that the Data / Refresh All was failing for him, and for other users. A review of his laptop showed that his Visio version had been updated to build 1708 from 1609 and the refresh was reverting the carefully renamed data recordsets back to the underlying SharePoint view name. My own personal laptop, not the client’s, is at build number 1808, so I will get the real fix from Microsoft soon via the normal channel updates for Click-to-Run.

DataRefreshNameError
Data Refresh Name Error
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Using SharePoint Links and Hyperlinks in Visio

A current project of mine has caused me to look more closely at the use of links and hyperlinks in “modern” SharePoint Online libraries. Every “modern” SharePoint Online library gets the option to create a new Link in addition to any other content types. They are InternetShortcut files with a .url extension. Only the filename is easily editable once created because the target url is within the file, and no editor is provided. However, it does provide a method to create a repository of approved urls. The alternative approach is to create a column of Hyperlink type, which can be edited easily. This article looks at the implications of each when used in SharePoint Online and used within an external data recordset in Visio, with the intention of providing shapes with hyperlinks.


The video above shows how a Link is created in SharePoint Online, whilst the video below shows how a Hyperlink can be created (and edited).

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Using Visio and PowerBI with GraphDatabase in SQLServer

I went to a very interesting inaugural meeting of the South East UK Power BI Group last week. Whilst the presentation by Dr. Subramani Paramasivam was impressive for its ambition, it was the presentation by Andrew Fryer of Microsoft that particularly intrigued me. He introduced us to the world of Graph Databases, such as Neo4J and CosmosDB, but also demonstrated SQL Server 2017’s new Graph table types, called Node and Edge.  He used the latter because solution because he could use example in Power BI using the Force-Directed visual. Well, this SQL Server feature was new to me, and so I was inspired to see if I could use my favourite tool, Visio, to input data into a graph database, and to selectively display parts.

  • Graph Schema
  • Node Master
  • Edge Master


This is something that I have often grappled with because, great as Visio is for diagramming, it is not the answer in all situations. It is brilliant at connecting shapes together, and adding data to each shape, including the connector, but it would not be fantastic at displaying all the millions of data points and relationships in any graph database worth its salt. However, what if another application, such as PowerBI, could be used to analyse and filter the information down to a more manageable scale, and then export the filtered data set to Visio where it can display the relationships, and be enhanced for inclusion in reports? Although I really like PowerBI, I do not think it generally provides an output that is report quality.  Especially when reviewing the links between many nodes.
It is possible to insert data into SQL Server graph tables from csv files, but this is not always the most intuitive manner. Indeed, Andrew Fryer, whom I know to be a brilliant artist, resorts to sketching relationships freehand, and then creates tables or scripts from the diagram manually. So, what if you can use Visio to drag and drop nodes, and connect relationships between them, adding names and properties on the fly, as you go? Then, what if you could review your diagram, and then upload all of the nodes and edges to the database automatically? This process could be repeated on many pages, so that the data gets merged together in the graph database. The Visio pages can also be saved and remain available as a record of input, should any questions arise.
These new graph tables contain special column types that cannot be used directly by either PowerBI or Visio, so it is necessary to create views of the tables, thus effectively hiding them. I have a slight issue with the graphdemo database in the Microsoft article because it has extra columns on some Node and Edge tables. To me, this seems a little impure, and I think that the Node tables should only have an ID, Name and Properties column in addition to the Node columns, and the Edge tables should only have a Properties column in addition to the Edge columns. Ideally, the Properties columns in both tables should hold JSON data as text.
Anyway, I decided to create a proof of concept with just the basic Node and Edge attributes first. I also extended the sample database a little so I could have a bit more complexity. I decided to forget about using nice icons for now, and just keep it simple!

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PowerApps in PowerBI with Visio!!!

I am very excited to see that the preview for PowerApps in PowerBI has been released ( see Announcing availability of PowerApps custom visual for Power BI (preview) ). I saw this demonstrated months ago, and have been waiting impatiently ever since. Every time I have embedded a Visio diagram into PowerBI, I have wanted to display the selected shape data in a detail view … and now I can!
I cannot yet create a PowerBI report with the embedded PowerApps visual for consumption by the whole internet, but it should still solve many scenarios for organisations. I quickly added the new PowerApps visual to my example synchronised Org Chart and Desk Layout from my previous article ( #Visio in #PowerBI for viewing personnel hierarchies and locations ) , and recorded a simple selection in the following gif:

To do this, I simply created a default new PowerApps app from the queryOrg query in  Excel workbook I created previously, and modified the Item value for the DetailForm of the DetailScreen. I removed the BrowseScreen and EditScreen because they were not required. Then, hey presto, the correct record is displayed whenever a shape is selected.

Selecting a Person.gif
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