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Link Data to Shapes

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Updating the file path of data linked Excel tables in Visio

Link Data to Shapes in Visio (not the Standard edition though) is great for visualizing information, and I often use a multi-worksheet Excel workbook that I create locally, and then wish to re-link to a copy of the workbook elsewhere, or even in Office365. This is a simple task if there are only one or two Excel tables involved, but can become tedious when there are many. So, this blog is presents an semi-automated method of achieving this.

Firstly I have an Excel workbook that I have many worksheets with tables of data on them. I named each worksheet, and used the Format As Table command on each.

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A Visio Deck of Cards

Sometimes I try ideas out in Visio without a specific goal in mind, and I have been creating a Visio deck of cards recently, so I thought I would share it. In fact, I have only created one card but it is capable of being any card in the deck by changing its shape data! I can even get a randomly generated card … all without any code except for formulas in the ShapeSheet.

Firstly, I used four icons for hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades, from my set of metro icons stencils ( see http://blog.bvisual.net/2012/11/20/announcing-metro-icons-and-a-windows-app-tile-shape-for-visio/ ). I decided to keep the icons for the suits separate, with four per suit, but linked their visibility to a Suit Shape Data fixed list row. I also displayed the Value Shape Data as the text of each icon.

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I added a Face Up Shape Data row so that the suit and value are hidden by the Microsoft Office logo.

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Exposing the Visio Data Bars

Microsoft Visio Professional has had the ability to quickly visualize shape data with data graphics for a while now. This data can be displayed as Text, Data Bar, Icon Set or Color By Value. In an earlier article ( see http://blog.bvisual.net/2014/08/21/using-icon-sets-shapes-to-display-shape-data-values/ ), I showed how to enable the shapes in the Icon Sets stencil to be linked to data. Well, I had a similar request recently for the Data Bar shapes. However, Microsoft did not package the Data Bar shapes into a handy stencil, so I have done this for you.

Firstly, a reminder of the thirteen built-in Data Bar shapes that are available to you when you choose to display data as a Data Graphics / Data Bar:

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Visio Map of the World Update

My earlier post about the world in Visio shapes, see http://blog.bvisual.net/2013/08/16/visio-map-of-the-world/ , has been one of my most popular, and a reader recently asked about changing the colour of countries by data not in my original worksheet, and another asked about adding labelled dots.

Well, at first, I thought it would be quite simple to add more Data Graphics with the Color By Value that I already had, but then I realised that I needed to adjust some of the shapes that I had created from SVG in my previous article.

The problem is that some of the country shapes which were converted from SVG have geometry at the top group level. This means that any Data Graphic items, other than Color By Value, are actually sub-shapes of the group and will be hidden by the country shape itself. That is probably why the Data Graphics task, on the selected Afghanistan shape below, sent the AF label over to the right of it, whereas all the group shapes with all their geometry in sub-shapes, such as the AE (United Arab Emirates) shape, placed the label in its centre.

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Visio World Time Zones

My last post about a world map inspired me to find a time zone map that could be used in Visio. I found an SVG map at

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Standard_time_zones_of_the_world_%282012%29.svg that I could convert, and link a list of time zones from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_zones_by_UTC_offset that I put into Excel.

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I have used Visio’s Color By Value Data Graphics, so you can easily edit the colour scheme.

You can download this map from WorldTimeZones.vsdx

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Creating Shape to Page Hyperlinks Automatically using Link Data to Shapes

I demonstrated how to import hyperlinks into Visio shapes in a previous post – see http://blog.bvisual.net/2007/11/15/importing-hyperlinks-into-visio-shapes/, however, one of my readers wanted to know if the same mechanism can be used to create an hyperlink to another page in the same Visio document, rather than to an external web page. Well, it can be done … with a little preparation.

The Link Data to Shapes feature will by default only create external links because it pushes values from designated Shape Data fields into Hyperlink rows. You can designate Shape Data columns by ticking the Data Type / Hyperlink checkbox:

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