bVisual

Visio 2007

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Making Timelines with Dates Earlier than 1900 in Visio

I was asked recently about making Visio timelines with dates earlier than 1900, which is the start of time as far as Microsoft Office products are concerned, so I thought I’d try to adapt one of my approaches used on other projects. In this case, I am assuming that the data is coming from an Excel worksheet, and I will use the Link Data to Shapes feature in Visio Professional/Premium. Visio Standard users can still make the timelines manually, or could attempt to use the older Database Wizard.

Create the data source in Excel

The first decision I made was not to use date fields in Excel or Visio because of the 1st Jan 1900 is the start of everything issue. Therefore I created a table in a worksheet that splits the Start and End dates in Year, Month and Day columns:

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Linking Excel Ranges to Visio Shapes

I have often linked Excel worksheets and ranges to Visio over the years. I used the Database Wizard initially, but have been using the Link Data to Shapes feature since Visio 2007. I had noticed that I sometimes didn’t get a full list of the available ranges when trying to link in Visio, so I decided to investigate why.

Firstly, I created a sample Excel 2010 worksheet with a header row, and three rows of data in Sheet1.

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Deploying a Visio 2007 or 2010 VSTO add-in with Visual Studio 2010

I like extending Visio with custom code, and I have been doing it a long time. I progressed from VBA within Visio documents, to VB executable, using a C++ wrapper to register as Visio Add-ons, through VB.net COM add-ins to C# VSTO add-ins. Which ever language and method I use, it seems to me that deployment is always far more more difficult than it should be. Even though it has got simpler with VS 2010, there are still some gotchas…
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