I am presenting my view of using Visio to Visualize data with SQL Server and SharePoint today. The slideshow is available for viewing at https://doc.co/Q43c2m but, whilst I wait for my turn to talk, I have created a smart prism shape to demonstrate many of the smartness of shapes and the data linking features of Visio. The file can be downloaded from http://1drv.ms/1FDAZgI .
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One of the best aspects of Visio is the ability of shapes to hold data, and the easiest way to do this is to define rows of Shape Data. Each row can be defined as holding one of eight different types, and most of these can have their values formatted for display. In this article I discuss the formatting of these values, using either ShapeSheet functions or automation methods. The driver for this is my on-going frustration with the Microsoft provided standard Shape Data window because of its shortcomings … for example, its lack of multi-line support even though it can hold 64k characters in each row, and its lack of a time control, even though it can store dates and time.
I have recently been demonstrating how to automatically drop data point shapes into the correct latitude \ longitude position over a map image in Visio, and in this instalment I show how to automatically filter the dropped data points by a rectangular area. This will only work after calibrating the map image as in my previous article http://blog.bvisual.net/2015/05/26/calibrating-a-map-in-visio/ and then using the Data Point shape (or similar) from http://blog.bvisual.net/2015/05/27/distributing-data-points-automatically-on-maps-in-visio/
The principles of reading the Shape Data value from a selected shape to automatically drop rows from the active External Data window using the selected master shape could be applied to many scenarios.
In my last article, I described how to calibrate a map in Visio ( see http://blog.bvisual.net/2015/05/26/calibrating-a-map-in-visio/ ), and in this article I use a calibrated map to distribute data points from a linked data source automatically.
For this example, I drew a simple shape at the size that I want, but you could add this smartness to any shape. All you need is an external data recordset that contains the Latitude and Longitude values that need to be linked to each data point.
Many years ago, I wrote a blog article about calibrating a map in Visio ( see http://blog.bvisual.net/2008/09/30/moving-between-visio-and-kml/ ), but I used VBA and a shape from my friend Chris Roth / VisGuy. Well, I have now worked out how to calibrate a map without code!
This could be especially useful now that MapPoint has been deprecated
Last day of 2014, and the last of my word and number games in Visio … this is Scrabbled, which is a trainer for Scrabble. Okay, it was too difficult to do a fully working Scrabble board without code, and I was likely to break copyright if I did, so I invented a game with the Scrabble tile rack.
I have some suggested rules, but you can make your own up … I just wanted to see what I could do with just ShapeSheet functions..
