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ShapeSheet

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Using Emojis in Visio

In the new normal of social distancing, we can easily miss the nuances of facial expressions with the the various electronic communication platforms that we utilise. In our personal communications via mobile apps, we have all started to use Emojis to express sentiment and actions, although we can sometimes convey the wrong meanings unintentionally as some Emojis get re-purposed by certain sections of society. Microsoft Windows 10 added native support for Emojis a year ago, and they can be inserted into many Microsoft applications using the onscreen keyboard 👀:

Windows 10 Onscreen Keyboard
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Visual Risks of a Global Pandemic

Back in the early noughties, I was part of a start-up company to to visualise the risks of any dependency system. We used Visio, of course, to map operational components and assets into a hierarchy of dependencies that simply displayed the roll-up of perceived risk. One of the demonstration diagrams that we (mainly Humphrey Tizard) constructed in 2003 was for a global pandemic. How prophetic that seems now!

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Multi-line text in Visio Shape Data

The Shape Data (nee Custom Properties) dialog and window only provides a single line to view or edit text values. It is a great shame because the value can be up to 64k characters, and long text can be pasted into it. I, and many others, have complained about this for many years to Microsoft, but nothing has been done to rectify this. Of course, I do develop custom user interface components for many customers, but that is not always desirable. Therefore I sometimes re-purpose standard Visio elements to provide the ability to view or edit multi-line text in Shape Data rows.

  • Description Shape Data row
  • Edit using ScreenTip or Action
  • Scrollable multi-line text
    Scrollable multi-line text
  • The first 248 characters are displayed on mouse hover
  • Simple ShapeSheet formulas to do this
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What makes Visio smart?

I have been running my Visio consultancy for over 20 years now, and I have created Visio solutions for many organisations, big and small, across many countries. Most of them know that Visio can do much more than they know how to do, but they do not know how it can be done. I usually do a short demo to explain where the smartness in Visio comes from, so I thought I would share a little bit of this knowledge with a couple of videos that, I think, show why Visio is so smart!

A Visio shape and ShapeSheet
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Narrated Text in Visio for Accessibility

One of the ways that Visio supports accessibility is to provide text that is read out by a screen reader, such as Windows Narrator or JAWS. This Alt Text can be set using Format Shape / Size & Properties tab using the Title and Description text boxes. The Title is the initial text that is read out when a shape is attentioned, and the Description will only read out if the user pauses. The Description text box only allows 255 characters to be entered and displayed, but this is not actually the limit!

VisioAltText
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Understanding Visio Navigation Order

Visio defaults to tabbing from shape to shape in the order that the shapes are added to the page. However, this can end up with an illogical order if you are trying to navigate a diagram with the keyboard, which is often an accessibility requirement. Fortunately, Visio provides a Diagram Navigation pane so that the tab order can be changed, but how does it do it? The following short video shows how the navigation order, displayed as numbers in each shape, is assigned a value as soon as the order is edited.



Accessibility is important in my current project, so understanding how this happens was important to understand, and to surface this order to JavaScript, as we want to list the shapes in a logical order too.
I managed this by adding a User.visNavOrder to the master shape of all the significant masters, and a hidden Shape Data row, labelled “Navigation Order“. This has the following formula for its value:

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