Whilst the east coast of America has been battered by hurricane Sandy from the Atlantic (my commiserations), Microsoft have been hosting the //Build/ conference in the Pacific North West (specifically Redmond). I have been watching some of the overly fed attendees whoop with joy as they got given 100 Gb SkyDrive account, a Microsoft Surface and a Nokia Lumia 920 each. Yes, I felt jealous, but it would have cost me much more than their combined cost to get out there, so I stuck my head-phones into my large laptop and watched from the comfort of my living room. The reality of the devastation caused by nature can easily overwhelm the storm of technological advances that have been recently announced, but I am genuinely excited by Windows 8, SharePoint 2013, Office 2013 and, of course, Visio 2013.
[Read more…] about US Election Special – Vector Visio 2013 IconsShapeSheet Functions
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.
Adding More Smartness to Visio Connectors
Whenever I have been asked why I like Visio so much, I have usually cited its ability to connect shapes together; its ability to link to data; and its programmability. Visio 2010 formally added a structured diagram concept and API, and the premium edition introduced diagram validation. So many different types of Visio diagrams require elements to be connected together correctly, and I often have to add a little extra into the connectors to make them smarter.
What is a connector?
A connector is a Visio shape that has 1-D behavior. The most used example is the Dynamic connector shape, which not only connects elements together, but can also re-route itself according to the layout and routing options selected for a page.
[Read more…] about Adding More Smartness to Visio ConnectorsChecking a Visio Shape for Cell Errors
I have been analysing a client’s Visio shapes recently to find out how to increase their performance. These shapes have numerous cells with ShapeSheet functions that reference other cells in the same shape, in parent shapes, in the page and in the document. I suspected that there may be some formulas producing erroneous results, so I wanted to write a macro to check if there are any cell formula evaluation errors in the shape, or its sub-shapes.
A Visio Cell object has an Error property that returns the error code generated by the last evaluation of the result. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff767327.aspx for more information about the the Error property, and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff766442.aspx for the VisCellError constants.
In order to test a macro that can check a shape for errors, I fist needed to generate examples of each possible error in a shape. So, I created a User-defined Cells section with seven rows – one for each possible VisCellError code value.
I was able to generate errors in all rows, except for the VisErrorName row. No matter how hard I tried, I could not get Visio to generate this error. I am fairly certain that I could generate errors (accidently) before Visio 2010, but I think that Microsoft have made this error much rarer because of the way they substitute last known values when a referenced cell or row is deleted.
So, now that I had a shape with errors, I then duplicated it, and made the duplicate copy part of a grouped shape. This way I could test my function, CheckForErrors(), which simply iterates through all of the selected shapes, and their sub-shapes, and prints out any cells with errors into the Immediate Window:
My macro printed out the following table:
So, I can now check any shape to see if it has any cell errors within it.
The VBA code that produced the listing is :
Public Sub CheckForErrors() Dim shp As Visio.Shape Debug.Print Now() Debug.Print "Parent.Name", "Shape.Name", "Section", "Row", "Column", "Name", "Error", "Formula" For Each shp In Visio.ActiveWindow.Selection CheckShapeForErrors shp Next End Sub Private Sub CheckShapeForErrors(ByVal shp As Visio.Shape) Dim shpSub As Visio.Shape Dim iSect As Integer Dim iCol As Integer Dim iRow As Integer Dim cel As Visio.Cell For iSect = visSectionFirst + 1 To Visio.visSectionLast For iRow = 0 To shp.RowCount(iSect) - 1 For iCol = 0 To shp.RowsCellCount(iSect, iRow) - 1 Set cel = shp.CellsSRC(iSect, iRow, iCol) If cel.Error <> VisCellError.visErrorSuccess Then Debug.Print cel.Shape.Parent.Name, cel.Shape.Name, iSect, iRow, iCol, cel.Name, cel.Error, cel.Formula End If Next iCol Next iRow Next iSect For Each shpSub In shp.Shapes CheckShapeForErrors shpSub Next End Sub
I would be interested to find out of anyone who can create a VisErrorName for me!
Now() then, settle down!
It has long been said that Visio’s ShapeSheet was modelled on Excel’s WorkSheet with it’s ability to enter formulae from a set list of functions. Indeed, there is a lot of similarity between some of Visio’s ShapeSheet functions and similar ones found in Excel, however one should exercise some caution and check that the behaviour is as expected. I recently forgot to do this with the NOW() function, and it caused me some grief for a while.
I had constructed a Today shape in Visio, and used the NOW() function to position the shape in the horizontal, and to display the date value in a Shape Data row and in the ScreenTip.
In Excel, if you enter the NOW() function into a cell, it immediately evaluates when the formula is entered. So, if you enter the same formula in multiple cells (by typing … not copying), it will evaluate at the time that you enter it. Thus you can apparently have different times displayed.