One of the concepts built into Microsoft Visio is Structured Diagrams. The key elements of this are connectivity, containers and callouts. See Container, List and Callout API in Visio 2010 for more information. This article may have Visio 2010 in the title, but it just means it was introduced then, and has become more developed since then.
A special type of container is a list, and there are only a few places where you can see this feature being used in the out-of-the-box Visio, so I have made a few more examples of how lists can be used.
A key feature of a list is that the items in the list know their index position within the list, and this can be exploited to make some interesting diagram types.
Referencing Container Data in Visio
Microsoft Visio has a useful Structured Diagramming concept that consists of Containers, Callouts and Connectors. The first of these features make it possible for shapes to know what they are contained within, as a better option to grouping shapes together. Grouping can hide or break the grouped shapes smartness, so Visio provides two ways of…
Understanding Morse Clicks with Visio
A few years ago, I wrote an article about messaging and encryption inspired by a visit to the National Museum of Computing in the UK. I developed a Morse Click shape to demonstrate how Visio can be used to represent and learn Morse Code. However, I never published the shapes here, and my good friend…
Visio 2010 MVP Session videos reprise
Back in 2012, my fellow Visio MVPs, Scott Helmers and Chris Roth, and I recorded a series of 24 videos about Visio 2010. They were first hosted on Microsoft’s web site, then they put them up on YouTube, they they got deleted :-(. Well, we have managed to retrieve them, and put them back up…
Using Emojis in Visio
In the new normal of social distancing, we can easily miss the nuances of facial expressions with the the various electronic communication platforms that we utilise. In our personal communications via mobile apps, we have all started to use Emojis to express sentiment and actions, although we can sometimes convey the wrong meanings unintentionally as…
Using CODE() and UNICODE() functions in Visio
Microsoft Visio does have CHAR() and UNICHAR() ShapeSheet functions, just like Excel, but it does not have the inverse CODE() and UNICODE() functions, unlike Excel. However, there is a way to create a formula in the Visio ShapeSheet to provide these functions. The following worksheet demonstrates how the CHAR(), CODE(), UNICHAR(), and UNICODE() functions work…
Preventing Deletion of Container Members in Visio
The concept of Structured Diagrams was introduced in Visio 2010 and is featured in many of the templates supplied with Microsoft Visio, and in some third-party solutions, like mine. Connectors, callouts, containers and lists are the key parts of a structured diagrams, and there are times when preventing the deletion of members of a container…