I was recently looking into custom color themes for corporate branding in desktop Microsoft Visio and became re-aware how different Visio still is from the rest of the Microsoft Office applications. A Visio page or document does not need to have any theme applied, but the documents of the other Office applications always have a theme. This means that custom theme colors are not available in Visio until a theme is selected, because custom theme colors rare a variation of a theme. This should not be necessary all the time, so I tried to produce a way of having an approved swatch of colours in a document, from which the individual colors can be copied.
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When is a Visio Callout not a Callout?
I have been a Visio user/developer since the mid-1990’s and seen the word “callout” used as part of the name of many master shapes in Visio. The images below show five ways that the term “callout” has been applied to the name of Visio master shapes. Generally, each evolution has been an advance on the previous ones, or have becoome specialised for their usage … until Microsoft made “callout” shapes available in Visio web editions. These are not an advance in evolution, but are a radical regression, and in my opinion, quite unnecessarily basic, and extremely frustrating.
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Moving Phases/Separators in Visio Cross-Functional Flowcharts?
I use Visio Cross-Functional Flowcharts a lot, but there is one thing that really bugs me … you can move function bands\swimlanes around, but you can’t move the phases\separators in the same way. The phases/separators are containers just like the function bands\swimlanes, so why can’t I move them? Actually, it is quite understandable when you realise what is actually going on … both are contained within the Cross-Functional Flowchart (CFF) shape, but there are list containers between each band and the parent CFF shape.
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Using Notepad++ to Edit Visio ShapeSheet formulas
Visio shapes get their smartness from the formulas that are entered into the ShapeSheet, but editing these formulas can be extremely tricky and prone to error because of the lack of a modern programmer’s interface. Formulas can be quite long (up to 64k characters) but even medium size ones like the one in User.GetWorkdays cell below from an earlier article can become a challenge. I have been using Notepad++ for many years to copy and paste the formulas from a cell so that I can split the text into multiple lines, and to see where the bracket pairs are. My good friend John Goldsmith pointed out that I can record a macro in Notepad++ and create a custom language style. So together we improved our environment for editing ShapeSheet formulas.
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Adding a second Function header bar to Visio swimlanes
I was recently asked if a second function header bar can be added to the swimlanes in the cross-functional flowchart templates in Visio. Some swimlanes can get quite wide, so it can be useful to have a duplicate function header shape on the far-side too. It is quite simple to duplicate the existing function header sub-shape and then change its position to the opposite side of the swimlane.
More Parsing XML Data in Visio Shapes
My last article looked at parsing an XML string with a known structure and order of elements and attributes. This can be acceptable in some scenarios, but what if the elements or attributes are in a different order? Then it is necessary to use the element and attribute names rather than their index position. This requires a little more complexity to the ShapeSheet functions, and this can result in longer processing time, so needs to be used cautiously, but it is possible, as I demonstrate in this article.
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