Visio Guy

Well, we held off doing this as long as possible--mostly because there are several other forums devoted to Visio (see:Visio Newsgroups and Discussion Boards)--but thanks to all of your enthusiasm, the Comments feature of this web-site was becoming seriously overloaded...

So we've added the Visio Guy Forums, where you can post questions, discuss issues, and share solutions with each other. You can also get to the forums by clicking the FORUM item at the right-end of the page navigation bar.

We haven't linked the user registrations from this site to the forum yet, so you'll have to create a new log in (sorry!), but the process is pretty painless. See you on the other side!

Recently, I was digging through some old projects, when I stumbled upon a Visio SmartShape that is loads of fun, and perhaps even slightly useful!

Years ago, I created a demo for one of Microsoft's marketing groups. One of the shapes is a laser show projection shape and was used in a scaled drawing of a baseball stadium that was to be configured for a software trade show party rock concert.

If you do any kind of system integration, especially stage-layout, event wiring diagrams or something similar, you might find this shape useful. But that's not the interesting part...

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If you've ever drawn arcs in Visio, then grouped them together with other shapes, you may have noticed that they behave rather oddly on resizing. As you make the group bigger or smaller, the arcs may bow or squish in ways that you didn't expect.

This problem arises because of the interaction style of the arc shapes, which is 1D. Visio has two interaction styles: 1D and 2D. They have to do with the green handles you see on the shape, and how you go about manipulating the shape with the mouse.

In this article, we'll describe the difference between the two interaction styles, and explain how to correct resizing problems you might be encountering.

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Relatives ask me now and again if That Visio software can help me make quilting patterns?. I start to answer Well, maybe... and then we get side-tracked by family gossip and questions about When ya moving home?, etc, so nothing ever comes of it.

Between my relative's inquiries and the decent traffic for the article: Visio for Fashion Design?, this seems to be a niche with more than passing interest.

On a recent trip to the Great Northwest and the Land of Microsoft, the sewing question arose yet again, but this time I had a large swath of fabric at my disposal.

The wheels in my head started turning...

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Many Visio users create detailed elevation drawings of network and audio/visual equipment. The quality of these drawings can impress customers and enable equipment to be more quickly recognized in a diagram.

While vendors such as Altima and D-Tools provide detailed Visio shapes, you may find yourself needing to create your own shapes from time to time.

One method for creating detailed equipment shapes involves tracing an image of the actual gizmo. We'd like to offer a few tips to help you get the job done in Visio!

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Visio has tons of keyboard shortcuts, including modifiers for constraining the resizing and moving of shapes. For instance, with the Shift key depressed, you can constrain a shape to move only vertically or horizontally. Neat-o!

But unless I have totally missed something (which does occur occasionally), there is one feature that Visio could really use: the ability to resize shapes on-center.

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Whether you're a Visio end-user creating measured drawings, or you're developing a Visio solution with customized Visio shapes, at some point, you'll want to know how big your shapes are, and how to precisely resize them.

There are several ways to do this, and many of them allow you to edit the data as well. Today's post offers a run-down of the many ways that you can edit and view the size of your Visio shapes!

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You can quickly create detailed shapes by importing images into Visio. If you don't have time (or budget!) to make a detailed drawing of that special ThinkPad or iPhone or USB Stick shape that you've been craving, you can simply browse for an image, and insert it into Visio!

It's a fairly simple matter that you can achieve via two ways: Choose the menu: Insert > Picture > From File... or: Copy an image from an image-editor or image-viewing program and paste it into a Visio page. Simple indeed!

But what happens to Visio file sizes when you import images?

Does Visio compress famously-large BMP files on import, or will the .vsd become huge itself? Will we get significant savings by importing JPG or PNG files as opposed to straight-bitmaps?

Well today, we ran a few tests to see what happens!

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