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Gus am bris an là – David A. Edson

My first introduction to the art of Visio development was provided by David Edson, M.Arch. MCP. back in 1996 in Paris. Visio Corporation parachuted him and Mark Davision into that beautiful city to spread the knowledge with a week of intensive ShapeSheet and automation training. Dave was inspirational, and that week set the course for the rest of my life. His enthusiasm for the smartness of Visio and his similar background to my own, as an architect, meant that we immediately connected and understood each other. I stayed at his self-designed house in the woody hills near Seattle in the early days, and he has stayed with me in the England, though I know he would have preferred that it was Scotland, the land of his forefathers.
Dave wrote many books and articles about Visio, and created many videos, so he will live on in the ether for a long time, but many will remember his effortless presentations enthusiastically describing how to make smarter diagrams.
Here is an early example of his work, a simple Back Gammon game, that he created to demonstrate the capabilities of Visio with some VBA code.

backgammon


Dave was also a great photographer, and connoisseur of single malt whisky, but it will be for his belief in Visio that he will perhaps be best remembered. I recommend that all Visio users worldwide visit his website and download all of the free resources that he provided : (no longer available)
Gus am bris an là – David A. Edson

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More secrets of the Visio Legend shape

I was going to do a full post on the special Legend shape in Visio that can automatically count instances of masters on a page, then I found that my good friend Chris Roth, aka VisGuy, had done one some years ago ( see visguy.com/…/legend-shapes). However, I have some extra information that will assist in getting the functionality to work consistently.
Basically, you can make any Master work with the Legend shape by adding the User.visLegendShape = 2 setting into a Master shape, but there are caveats.

  1. If the name of a Master is changed, then any existing shapes on the page must be re-placed
  2. The BaseID of each Master must be unique
  3. If the BaseID is changed (using NewBaseID), then any existing shapes on the page must be re-placed

To demonstrate this, I used the Good and Bad icon shapes from the Legend Shapes stencil.

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Opening an MS Access form from a Visio shape

This article describes how to open a Microsoft Access form at a specific record from a Visio shape. I was an Access developer before I was a Visio developer, and both of the applications have VBA to provide tactical solutions for everyday tasks. Fortunately, it is fairly simple to copy the VBA code from one application to another…



Firstly, I am assuming that both of the desktop applications are open, and although Visio shapes can be linked to Access queries and tables, it is not essential for this solution.

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Visio Sessions at MS Ignite Conference 2016

I will be a co-presenter at the Microsoft Ignite Conference on 28th Sept. 2016 ( see Dive deep into advanced Data Visualization with Visio ) along with my fellow MVPs Scott Helmers and Ed Richard, and led by Sandeep Srivastava, from Microsoft. I am really looking forward to it because it will be a great opportunity to learn more about all of the exciting developments happening at Microsoft nowadays. Of course, I will also be showing off what we can do in Visio too, and to that end I have created a session location finder in Visio.
The MS Ignite Conference is an enormous 5 day event, with over 1300 sessions spread over three buildings and 5 floors. The conference website provides the opportunity to build your personal schedule, and to download a Word trip report. Unfortunately, this report does not include the rooms and the zone or building that they are in. Therefore, I used some of my facilities management experience and Visio to provide a multipage Visio document with building section and plans provide the location context for each session in my, or attendees, schedule.

Zone Timer.gif


The Visio document contains macros to import the Word report downloaded from the MS Ignite website, and for running a timer between a start and end time.

Section TImer.gif


I have provided the Visio document for download*, so that it can be used by any attendees how have Visio Professional 2016 or Visio Pro for Office 365:
MS Ignite Trip Reporter.vsdm
I will explain how it all works in a future posting, but the document contains full instructions of how to use it, and it includes my current schedule of sessions so that it can be played with even by non-attendees.
*This document was updated with the up to date Session locations on 20 Sept. 2016

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Dropping and Connecting Linked Data Shapes in Visio

I like linking data to shapes in Visio. It saves time in filling in Shape Data and adding text, or any Data Graphic to them. Basically I am lazy, and I also like to create macros for repetitive tasks, so in this blog I provide two macros to save the drudgery of two tasks I do so often:

  1. Dropping and data linking a number of items from an External Data recordset filtered by values in a column or columns
  2. Connecting shapes together following a parent-child relationship between Shape Data values
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Filter Visio External Data to Drop Shapes

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.

image
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