I needed to display the week number of dates in a Visio project of mine, but there is no WeekNum(…) function built-in, so I had to write one, and allow for the date that the week numbers begin in to be varied from 1st January. I also needed to allow for the week numbers to go backwards from the specified week number begin date.
Excel has a WeekNum(..) function, which can take an optional parameter for the day of the week to begin on, and an IsoWeekNum(..) function, and the following table shows the values change for the first 35 days of the year:
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Excel
Sorry about Brexit
In these days of political uncertainty in the UK, and our position in Europe or the world, there is only one thing that I can say: Sorry about Brexit … in every main language of the EU countries!
Prototyping Visio ShapeSheet Formulas in Excel
I am working on an application where the horizontal axis of the Visio page represents dates from left to right. In fact, the each of the fixed horizontal grids are 1 day, and I need to have shapes that understand the begin date at the left edge of the shape, and the end date at the right edge of the shape. There is, therefore, a number of elapsed days representing by the width of the shape. However, the underlying grid can either represent all days, or it can be changed to only represent weekdays by omitting the weekends. I struggled to find the best formula to calculate the elapsed days or weekdays between two dates in Visio ShapeSheet formulas, so I turned to Excel to provide an inspiration. The Visio ShapeSheet is modelled on the Excel worksheet, and formulas can be entered into the cells in much the same way. However, the available functions differ since Excel is mainly used for arithmetic and statistics, but Visio is used for graphics and data. In this article, I demonstrate how I used C# and Excel to construct and test formulas for use in a Visio shape.
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Support for the Visio JavaScript API in SharePoint Modern Framework, and more
It was the last day of the MSIgnite conference today, and the video of the final presentation about Visio was worth staying for, even though some of it was content I knew about, and have mentioned in previous posts this week ( see Dive into the world of data-driven operation intelligence with Microsoft Visio, Excel and Power BI). However, there was some content I was particularly pleased to see, and that was about support for the Visio Online JavaScript API support in Modern SharePoint Framework. I have pulled out some of the key slides below, but check out the full session for more information.
The hardworking Microsoft Visio product development team have worked hard to almost match all of the functionality of the old server-side Visio services control, but they haven’t quite got everything. So I cheered when I hear that support for html overlays are in the roadmap to be supported! All I ask for now (almost) is layer control, and I will be very happy.
They also stated that they will be enabling all this functionality for non-SharePoint web sites in the future!
Go to http://aka.ms/voapireference got more details.
Data Centre Racks in Visio in PowerBI
I have often diagrammed rack and cabinet layouts and elevations using Visio linked to a database or Excel tables. There is a Rack Diagram template in Visio which is great for manually creating cabinet elevations manually, but there is nothing currently out of the box to automate this process, so it can be a laborious task unless you have some custom code. It is quite simple to draw a computer room layout of the racks and cabinets and to link each one to a row of data. In this article, I have a table of rack equipment in Excel, and used PowerQuery in PowerBI to summarize these rows for each data center, rack and U height position, since there are sometimes more than one item of equipment per U height. In this example, I have color coded the criticality of each equipment such that the most important display as red, and the least important as green. This means that a PowerBI user can quickly see where the critical racks, U heights and equipment are. Of course, I could have used any metric, such as power consumption, heat output or humidity, for the colour-coding. It all depends on the data available, and the audience for the report.
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Using Visio and PowerBI with GraphDatabase in SQLServer – Part 2
In my last article, I described how Visio can be used to input Nodes & Edges into a SQL Server graph tables (see Using #Visio and #PowerBI with #GraphDatabase in #SQLServer). In this article, I show how PowerBI can be used to create an Excel table that can then be used to automatically create a Visio diagram. This diagram can then be enhanced for reports and presentations, or used to check the validity of nodes and relationships. The shapes can then be used to update or delete edges and nodes in the database.
