bVisual

Visio

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Previewing the Visio Custom Visual in PowerBI

It is time to talk about the new Visio custom visual for PowerBI. You may have read about it at Visio Power BI example and Add Visio visualizations to Power BI reports, but I wanted to add my findings. First, it is great to see this feature, but it is not yet the finished article. However, I hope I can show that it can be an extremely useful addition to the business intelligence toolset from Microsoft. I think that the existing Link Data to Shapes and Data Graphics features in Visio desktop are considered to be Operational Intelligence capabilities, whereas this new custom visual for PowerBI is definitely Business Intelligence. This is a different discipline, and I have been developing some guidelines for good practice when using Visio with PowerBI. In this article, I will demonstrate how I created a PowerBI dashboard using graphics and data from last years Microsoft Ignite conference.

VisioExcelPowerBI

Let me set the expectations because I am working with a preview of the Visio custom visual.

[Read more…] about Previewing the Visio Custom Visual in PowerBI

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Managing People, Processes and Performance in PowerPoint? There is a better way!

I will be presenting a webcast on Thursday, March 23 | 12.00 to 13.00 (UTC) demonstrating how data-linked diagrams can provide a much more efficient and dynamic method for operational intelligence than PowerPoint.

Follow this  link to register : http://bit.ly/2m2sPOv
 

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Visio Pro for Office365 Partner Templates

It is becoming clear that Microsoft are making Visio Pro for Office365 (VPfO) their priority. Its update cadence is much quicker than the non-cloud versions of Visio, and there are some features that may not make it to them. A case in point is partner templates and sample diagrams. It appears that Categories has been renamed as Templates in VPfO and there is a new tab named Sample Diagrams. The Partner Templates are at the bottom of the Templates tab, and there is a Partner Sample Diagrams section too on the Sample Diagrams tab.


I am pleased to note that five of my templates made it into the Education category. Each of these templates are from earlier blog posts here!

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MSIgnite Sessions to Watch in Visio

Sessions2Watch.gif

Well, MS Ignite is over for another year. I planned to visit loads of sessions, but the reality was that I spent many hours on the Visio booth. Fortunately, many of them were recorded, including ours, but I don’t have time to watch over 700 videos! So, I looked through them all and picked out 50-odd, and used Get & Transform in Excel again to create suitable queries to link to Visio.

The more I use PowerQuery, the more I like it. I was able to extract the unique values in the Personas, Tags, and Products columns which each contained comma separated lists. I data-linked these values to large circles on different pages, and data-linked the Sessions to Watch to hexagonal shapes. I then wrote a little VBA code to link the circles to the hexagons with data-linked connectors. Data Graphics was applied to all shapes, including the connectors, and a legend added. Each of the Session hexagons have an automatically created hyperlink to the On-Demand Video. I used a standard radial page layout so that I had minimal manual movement shapes.
The end result is a visual dashboard by Persona, Tag and Product to open the videos for the sessions I want to watch.

[Read more…] about MSIgnite Sessions to Watch in Visio

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Updates to MSIgnite Visio Session Documents

I will be leaving soon for Atlanta to the MS Ignite Conference, but first I checked the latest schedule and found some additions and some slight title changes, so I have updated the documents provided in my last two posts:
MS Ignite Conference 2016 Sessions in Visio
Visio Sessions at MS Ignite Conference 2016
Also, I have produced a short, silent video of the process to import your own Ignite Trip Report.docx from the MS Ignite website to Visio.


See you in Atlanta!
 

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Three short Visio 2016 video tutorials

I recently created three short videos for Microsoft about the most popular uses of Visio, and utilizing some of the latest features:

  • How to create an Org Chart
  • How to create a Process Flow Diagram
  • Creating a Network Chart
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They are all less than 5 minutes long, and you don’t see me fortunately.

Watch them on YouTube :

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTtplW6mJ7fVJjJ6KOMAdA_uBWaPJe-4i