bVisual

Shape Design

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Protecting the integrity of custom Visio masters

All of my Visio solutions contain custom masters because this is the best way to create smart shapes that respond to user’s needs. This usually means creating Shape Data, User-defined Cells and Action rows that govern aspects of the shape with formulas designed to provide an efficient user interface. As a developer I sometimes forget that other users may not perform the same actions as I do, and can accidently undo all my intended behaviour. For example, in recent testing of a visual stream mapping system that I am working on, my carefully constructed master-shape relationship was being broken by grouping some of them together, thus changing their behavior and hiding them from some of the custom functions. The reason given was to that they want to create copies and this seemed like a reasonable way to do it. Now, I have known that this is bad ever since my original Visio developer training back in 1996, so I always avoid doing this, and erroneously thought that other would know this too. I was wrong to be so myopic, so I explored how I can best prevent this and other user actions that could break the intended master-shape relationship.

  • Multiple instances of a single master shape
  • Locking some properties of the shape
  • Modifying group behaviour
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Understanding Morse Clicks with Visio

A few years ago, I wrote an article about messaging and encryption inspired by a visit to the National Museum of Computing in the UK. I developed a Morse Click shape to demonstrate how Visio can be used to represent and learn Morse Code. However, I never published the shapes here, and my good friend John Marshall recently wrote an article about Braille in Visio, so I thought I should explain how I made the Morse Click shapes, and I took the opportunity to enhance the shapes with some accessibility features that I have learnt since I originally designed them. I have also changed the shapes to be Visio Web friendly, which means, for example, removing shape effects.

I think I learnt Morse Code as a Cub Scout, but forgotten it in the half-century since. Its evolution, and its use today still makes very interesting reading. Each letter comprises of between one and four short or long clicks, whilst each number has five such clicks. Generally, the most used letters have lesser clicks, with ET being the lowest number, presumably to save an extra terrestrial money on a phone call home!

  • Number of Clicks per Character
  • With page Shape Data Hide Text = False

There are just two master shapes of interest here, Morse Click and Morse Click Rack, and a couple of page Shape Data rows. The Morse Click shape can be anyone of the 36 characters with a simple Shape Data value change, whilst the Morse Click Rack is a list shape and can spell out the words of up to 26 Morse Click shapes within it.

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Correcting the Text Control Handle on Visio Network Shapes

There are literally thousands of master shapes in the stencils supplied with Microsoft Visio, so I guess that mistakes can creep in. One error that I have noticed is the inability of the default text control handle of many of the network shapes to actually move the text block horizontally.

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Forcing Display Update of Inherited Data Values

I was going to title this “When is a truth not a truth?” because I have found that Visio can sometimes refuse to apparently update the displayed value in a cell, even though it has been changed. However, this was, in this instance, down to a misunderstanding of the formula evaluation events on my part. Take the scenario where you have some data that you want to be available to all pages and all shapes in the Visio document. There are some built-in Document Properties in Visio that are accessible to all pages and shapes using ShapeSheet functions ( eg TITLE(), SUBJECT(), COMPANY(), Categories / CATEGORY(), Tags / KEYWORDS(), Comments / DESCRIPTION(), Author / CREATOR(), MANAGER() and HYPERLINKBASE()). However, Visio does not have custom Document Properties like the other Office applications. Instead, Visio allows for the addition of User-Defined Cells and Shape Data rows in the DocumentSheet of the document. These can be uniquely named, and Shape Data rows can be given a data type (of sorts), a label, prompt and format.

These values can be accessed via a ShapeSheet function from anywhere within the document, which ensures that you only have one version of the truth. However, there is no non-developer user-interface to edit these DocumentSheet Shape Data values in Visio, so what do you do? And how can you be sure that you are always seeing these centralised values correctly?

I created the following master shape to test how this can be done. It is a group shape that contains a single StartDate Shape Data row, which is used to edit or view the date in the similarly named Shape Data row in the DocumentSheet. For good measure, I also added a similarly named Shape Data row to the page, so the Shape Data window in the page could also be used. I then used Insert / Field to display the values in the ShapeSheet, PageSheet and DocumentSheet:

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Getting the Microsoft Office Theme Value

I am working on a Visio VSTO project where I need to synchronise a UI element with the current session Microsoft Office Theme. At first, I thought that there would be some way of getting a value from the Visio object model, but I was wrong…

The Office Theme can be selected from either the Visio Options, or the Account Options panels.

  • Visio Options
  • Account Options
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Changing Visio Shape Size and Angle with Linked Data

I was recently laying out a computer room floor plan to scale in Visio, from survey data of the cabinets\racks within it, and it occurred to me that I could work a bit smarter than I first thought. Originally, I was going to just add lots of rectangles, size them, rotate them, and label each them with their name. Then I thought, why not use the Width, Depth and Name columns from the survey data to do most of the work for me? It was so simple to do, and only took a few minutes, so I thought I would share my methodology because it demonstrates how easy it is to work smarter with Visio….

These are the simple steps shown above, written out for your education….

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