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Legend

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More secrets of the Visio Legend shape

I was going to do a full post on the special Legend shape in Visio that can automatically count instances of masters on a page, then I found that my good friend Chris Roth, aka VisGuy, had done one some years ago ( see visguy.com/…/legend-shapes). However, I have some extra information that will assist in getting the functionality to work consistently.
Basically, you can make any Master work with the Legend shape by adding the User.visLegendShape = 2 setting into a Master shape, but there are caveats.

  1. If the name of a Master is changed, then any existing shapes on the page must be re-placed
  2. The BaseID of each Master must be unique
  3. If the BaseID is changed (using NewBaseID), then any existing shapes on the page must be re-placed

To demonstrate this, I used the Good and Bad icon shapes from the Legend Shapes stencil.

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Improving the legend of multi-data Data Graphic items in Visio

Data Graphics in Visio Professional (and Premium) are a great way of surfacing the information in each shape, but it can be easy to forget what the Color By Value, Icon Sets or Data-bars represent:

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Automating Page.DropLegend in Visio 2010

Visio 2007 introduced Data Graphics but, in my opinion, didn’t provide any automatic legends for the icons and colour by value options. That is why I wrote DataLegends (see http://www.bvisual.net/Products/DataLegends.aspx ) as an add-in for Visio 2007 several years ago. This oversight was remedied in Visio 2010 when Microsoft introduced their own legends (which were not totally dissimilar to my own), and also added a method (Page.DropLegend) for programmers to automate this task.

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Adding the Sixth Legend Icon in Visio 2010

In my previous two articles, I described how to have 6 icons in a Data Graphic Icon Set, and provided some VBA code to make your own icons sets from existing Visio shapes or images. One thing that I overlooked was the Insert Legend command in Visio 2010, because it does not add the sixth icon automatically, so this blog describes how to add it. As a side effect, the code also enables the legend labels of icon and CBV (Color By Value) items to be edited.

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When you use the Insert Legend command, it examines the Data Graphics used on the active page, to create legends for each Icon Set or Color By Value settings that it finds. Closer examination of the legend shapes, shows that an instance of the Icon Set master shape is added for each of the icons found.

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