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.
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…
Visio Pro for Office365 Partner Templates
It is becoming clear that Microsoft are making Visio Pro for Office365 (VPfO) their priority. Its update cadence is much quicker than the non-cloud versions of Visio, and there are some features that may not make it to them. A case in point is partner templates and sample diagrams. It appears that Categories has been…
Visio Rocks for Flag Semaphore … or another use of Lists
My good friend and fellow Visio MVP, John Goldsmith, aka visualSignals.typepad.co.uk, was telling me about a family visit to a semaphore tower over the weekend. Well, I just couldn’t resist making a flag semaphore shape in Visio. First, I looked up semaphore up Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_semaphore . The character can easily be changed with the Shape…
Get Scrabbled with Visio
Last day of 2014, and the last of my word and number games in Visio … this is Scrabbled, which is a trainer for Scrabble. Okay, it was too difficult to do a fully working Scrabble board without code, and I was likely to break copyright if I did, so I invented a game with…
A Visio Countdown to Xmas
I presented a Visio deck of cards in a previous post ( see http://blog.bvisual.net/2014/12/03/a-visio-deck-of-cards/ ), and now I present a real game that can be played with Visio over the holiday season. Countdown is a British TV programme with word and number puzzles. It was the first programme to be aired on Channel 4, and…