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Visio Plan 2

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Pushing Data Visualizer in Visio to the limits!

Regular readers of my blog will know that I like to use the Data Visualizer (DV) in Visio Plan 2, but I recently tried to help a user who really decided to push it to the limits. In this scenario, there were multiple connections, but with different labels, being created between the same flowchart shapes, and the plea was how to make it work! Well, I experimented with this, and found that DV does not really work well in this way, and then proposed an alternative approach, which I will explain in this article.

First, I will show how it fails by setting up an Excel table that does contains multiple connections, but fails to update the labels consistently.

Excel Table with Multiple Links
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Custom Shapes in Visio in M365 and Web

Microsoft recently announced the ability to access the shapes in the document stencil whilst using Visio for Web … if you have a Visio Plan 2 license. So, I thought I would make it clear what that means for custom shape developers. There are now three licenses that provide the ability to edit Visio diagrams in the web browser.

  • Visio in Microsoft 365 – now provided to all commercial M385 subscribers, it is a light version of Visio for Web
  • Visio Plan 1 – a subscription that provides Visio for Web in a browser, with more templates and features than Visio in M365
  • Visio Plan 2 – a subscription that provides Visio for Desktop on Windows, in addition to Visio for Web in a browser anywhere

Typically, Visio solution developers create smart custom shapes that are deployed as masters in a stencil. None of the licenses currently provide the ability to deploy custom stencils for use by Visio in the web browser, however Visio Plan 2 license holders can access custom masters in the document stencil. This increases the ability of these users to use custom Visio documents on non-Windows devices. However, Visio in M365 users cannot edit Visio documents with custom masters, and Visio Plan 1 users cannot access the local document stencil.

  • Editing a Visio document with custom masters with M365
  • Editing a Visio document with custom masters with Plan 1
  • Editing a Visio document with custom masters with Plan 2
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SS Plus for Visio enhanced to support non-English PowerPoint Smart Layouts

A while ago, I wrote an add-in for Visio Plan 2, SS Plus, that enhances the PowerPoint export from Visio. This has been working fine for this using Microsoft Office in English, but a problem was recently brough to my attention about non-English users. The problem was that the PowerPoint Smart Layou names are in English, and were not showing up in the drop-down list on the SS Plus Settings dialog. This meant that no Smart Layout was being applied automatically to the export from Visio. Well, I am pleased to report that this has now been fixed, and existing users can upgrade free of chare, whilst others can download to trial for free.

The solution is not absolutely perfect though, because the list may appear initially in English until the first export is done to PowerPoint. SS Plus then grabs the names of the Smart Layouts from PowerPoint in the Office language.

I am afraid that the rest of the text is still in English though, because I am not fluent in anything else … to my shame!

In case there are any other requests, I have also added in a new Feedback form.

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Have multiple alternate languages in the same Visio diagram

I wrote a Visio add-in a few years ago that provides the ability to switch a multi-page Visio diagram between alternative languages. This particular client had just under a hundred pages of process flowcharts, with hyperlinks between the pages. They had to produce this Visio document in seven different languages and got extremely fed-up with trying to synchronise all the different copies whenever any changes were made, so a single Visio document which can store all of the alterative shape texts and page names was a much simpler time saving-solution. Moreover, Microsoft provide an online cognitive service which is useful for automatic speedy translations, though these can be overridden by a more knowledgeable user.

However, since this add-in was written, Microsoft have changed this translation service, and Visio has introduced 64bit version as the default. Therefore, I have updated the Multi-Language Text for Visio add-in to support both of these, and taken the opportunity to change the installation and licensing system.

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Update of Free Rules Tools for Visio Validation

Microsoft introduced Validation Rules in Visio 2010 Premium, and I was excited enough to write a book about it. Microsoft merged the Premium into the Professional edition in 2013, so I updated my book. I wrote an interface into the Visio Validation API as a free VSTO add-in, called Rules Tools. It was normal to install the 32bit edition of Office back then, but now 64bit is the default, so I have update the setup to detect whether a 32bit or 64bit edition needs to be installed, before continuing.

So now, anyone who has Visio Professional or Visio Plan 2 can use this free tool which provides the only interface available to review, import, export and write Visio Validation rules.

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Creating PowerPoint Presentations automatically from Visio

Visio Plan 2 has a great, but flawed, feature called Slide Snippets, that can create PowerPoint presentations automatically from any number of titled rectangles, on any number of pages in a Visio document. However, it usually creates distorted images, and it does not automatically contain any descriptive text or hyperlinks. I have previously described how the distortions can be manually fixed (see Manual Fix for Slide Snippets in Visio Plan 2 ), but that is tedious, so I have written a Visio add-in, SS Plus, to not only fix the image, but also allow hyperlinks to be added to it, and to include descriptive text that can include bold, italics and hyperlinks … and can be automatically converted into SmartArt layouts!

  • Simply edit the ScreenTip in Visio
  • .. to create SmartArt with Hyperlinks in PowerPoint
  • Denote bold and italic text in Visio
  • .. to create richer text blocks in PowerPoint
  • Add a hyperlink to the Slide Snippet in Visio
  • … to become an image hyperlink in PowerPoint

If you want to read more then please go to SS Plus to learn how you can try it for free!