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SQL Saturday Business Intelligence Special in Edinburgh

We had a fantastic weekend in Edinburgh where I presented Visio as a BI solution for SQL professionals at SQL Saturday. I volunteered because, quite frankly, I do not think that Microsoft promote Visio for BI enough, even though they have put in the BI domain for Microsoft partner competencies. This was a community event, so many thanks to all of the sponsors for enabling it, the many volunteers for running around, and especially to Jen Stirrup for organising it ( see http://jenstirrup.com/2015/06/15/jens-pass-diary-sqlsaturday-edinburgh-my-heartfelt-thanks-go-to/ ).

Adam Velo, a fellow MVP, took this photo of me, and he followed up with an excellent presentation about the psychology of data graphics (see http://blog.crmguru.co.uk/ ).

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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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Updating the file path of data linked Excel tables in Visio

Link Data to Shapes in Visio (not the Standard edition though) is great for visualizing information, and I often use a multi-worksheet Excel workbook that I create locally, and then wish to re-link to a copy of the workbook elsewhere, or even in Office365. This is a simple task if there are only one or two Excel tables involved, but can become tedious when there are many. So, this blog is presents an semi-automated method of achieving this.

Firstly I have an Excel workbook that I have many worksheets with tables of data on them. I named each worksheet, and used the Format As Table command on each.

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Cleaning Visio Documents

A Visio user recently showed me a Visio 2010 document that could not be viewed with the Microsoft Visio Viewer. He could open it in Visio okay, but not in the viewer. Well I tried just removing the unused masters and styles, etc (of which there were quite a few), but that did not allow it to be viewed either. Then I tried the document.Clean() method, and, hey presto, the document could then be viewed. Unfortunately, the Clean() method is not available in the UI, so I have created a macro to make it more accessible.

The File / Info / Reduce File Size dialog shows that there are unused masters and styles :

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Linking SQL database on Azure to Visio

Microsoft Visio has many data sources available for Link Data to Shapes, and one of those is SQL Server. Microsoft Azure is increasingly becoming a low-cost, and always available, choice for hosting all sorts of data, and applications, so I thought I would document how easy it is to setup a SQL database on Azure for use with Visio.

Creating the SQL database on Azure

First, you need register for an Azure subscription, and then create a SQL database on a server in a suitable location.

Create Azure Sql database

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The Visio 2010 MVP Sessions–on Windows Phone 8.1

So, I have now published the Visio 2010 MVP Sessions as a Windows Phone 8.1 app too ( see http://blog.bvisual.net/2014/06/27/the-visio-2010-mvp-sessions-windows-app/ ). This is the second part of my second Universal App.

I had some issues with orientation, and that YouTube videos have to be played via a browser, and not in a XAML media element, however I think that the app provides a handy way to view the 24 videos that Scott , Chris and I made for Microsoft.

The app is available for free from the Windows Phone store ( http://bit.ly/1kdSDwx )… if you have upgraded to the 8.1 OS version.

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