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Shape Data

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Union Jacked?

I am in Edinburgh, capital of Scotland, today. All talk is of the vote on Scottish independence next week … so, I thought I would make a Union Jack Visio shape that can be automatically changed, using Shape Data values, to represent the countries left in the union!

The Union Jack is comprised of the flags of England, Scotland and Ireland … sorry Wales, you are only a principality. Yes, I know that Northern Ireland is a province, but it was decided that St Patrick’s Saltire should be kept even after Eire got independence.

Note that a single country flag has an aspect ratio of 5:3, but a multi-country union flag has an aspect ratio of 2:1.

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Using Icon Sets shapes to display Shape Data values

A reader of my blog recently asked whether it is possible to use the icons in out-of-the-box Visio as the main shape, and get it to refresh with data. I pointed out that all of the icon sets are available in a handy stencil under Visio Extras, so all that remains is to make the icon display change according to data values.

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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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Visio Map of the World

I have often wanted a Visio map of the world, with countries that can be linked to data. There are a number of Visio country shapes that are available for download on the internet, but they are fairly old, and certainly don’t have an up to date world. For example, South Sudan is currently the newest country in the world (2011), though a lot of resources on the web don’t show it. So, I was relieved to find a good SVG world map at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BlankMap-FlatWorld6.svg?uselang=en-gb . Even better was that each of the shapes are named with the ISO2 code. This meant that I could use Link Data to Shapes to automatically create Shape Data from an Excel worksheet that I put together from various sources.

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Note that I had to add Kosovo manually, since it was not on the original map, as it’s status as a country is in dispute. The ISO codes have apparently been temporarily assigned.

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A Page Grid with Labels

Over a year ago, I wrote a blog about Page Grids and Off Page References ( see http://blog.bvisual.net/2011/09/02/page-grids-and-off-page-references/ ), and I promised to accommodate page margins. In addition, a user commented that a matching printable grid would be useful …. so here is an update. In this blog I provide an updated Off-page reference master, along with new GridLines and GridLabel masters.

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Assigning Shape Layers from a List in Visio

A Visio user recently asked if it is possible to assign shapes to layers from a list. In his case, he has an Excel table which he has exported shapes and their text using Visio’s Shape Reports feature, to which he has added a column named Layer, and he wants to assign the shapes to these layers. In this article, I demonstrate how this can be done.

I decided to use my MVP Session Wheel diagram ( see http://blog.bvisual.net/2012/06/29/mvp-sessions-wheel/ ) for this example because it already has some layers assigned.

I created a new Shape Report called Presenter Shapes, where I filtered all shapes on the current page to those where the Presenter Shape Data row exists, and the Presenter actually has a value:

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