So we’ve had this experimental Visio drawing containing crude attempts at 3D states laying around since 1993. But we only had three states: Washington, Oregon and California. Well after a few years, a few new Visio features, and some wisdom gained, we’ve finally gotten off our butts and written a little code that helped us produce something a little more useful: an entire map of the USA, where each shape can be extruded into the vertical! [Read more…] about 3D Extruded Map of USA
Archives for 2007
Map Distance Dimension Line
In this article, we share with you a dimension line SmartShape that can be calibrated to a scale on an imported image, and be subsequently used to measure distances in that space.
Since Visio is adept at importing images in a variety of formats, it can be a great time savings to start with an image as a background or basis for a diagram that you wish to produce. There are many scenarios where the imported art represents a scaled drawing, be it a map, a floor plan, or some other architectural drawing. [Read more…] about Map Distance Dimension Line
Month Math
An associate asked me the other day; “how do you add a number of months to a date?”
I thought this would be simple, because the ShapeSheet supports elapsed-time units in addition to date and time formats.
With elapsed-time, you can manipulate quantities of time, so the problem seemed fairly easy.
Well, not exactly… [Read more…] about Month Math
Visio Newsgroups and Discussion Boards
When 2D Glue Breaks
If you’ve used Visio’s 2D glue capabilities, you’ll know it’s pretty neat. Not only can you glue shapes to one-another, but you can get them to snap to a direction as well! However, if you’ve tried to heavily exploit this feature, you might have run into some problems.
VB Visio Drawing
If you are developing solutions for Visio, then you’ve probably dabbled with VB code in Visio’s Visual Basic for Applications editor. If you’ve been in the industry as long as I have, then you know that VB means Visual Basic. Period. End of story. But if you happen to also be from Australia, then it’s a different story…
Multi-Earth Shape
As we travel around the world, we’re looking at maps every single day. And being a Visio Guy, this naturally causes ideas to formulate in the old noggin. You may have seen and enjoyed the various map downloads from Visio Guy, but today, we’ve got something a little bit different.
I hope you’ll get a kick out of today’s SmartShape: the Multi-Earth Shape. This little bugger lets you choose four views and four color schemes, all with a click of the mouse!
Sales Force Automation With Visio
One of the areas in which Visio particularly shines is that of Sales Force Automation. With Visio, a rep can sit on-site with a customer, and visually spec out a system or an installation. The components in the Visio schematic can be linked to real product-data, and can be analyzed via code to generate bills-of-material and reports automatically.
On MSDN, I recently uncovered “oldie but goody” demo that shows off these capabilities. I created it for Visio 5.0, while I still worked for Visio Corp, and it still works with Visio 2003! The demo illustrates how a fictitious candy-manufacturing line might be laid out. Custom shapes represent general classes of equipment, and database links behind the shapes specify real-world items. With the click of a button, a Bill of Materials, is generated in an embedded Excel spreadsheet, sitting right on the page!
Run VBA Code When Documents Open
If you’ve dabbled with the VBA project that resides in Visio documents, then you’ve likely stumbled upon the Document object’s DocumentOpened event. This is a great place for running any initialization code that you might require, but there’s a better way…
Free Visio People Shapes
Do you need people shapes to spruce up those Org-charts, workflow diagrams, or marketing slides? Are you tired of Visio’s outdated or distracting-and-overly-3D shapes? Then you’ve come to the right place!
Today Visio Guy offers its own version of the The Human Form. A subtly shaded, Fisher-Price-looking, person-pawn for your downloading pleasure. And of course, they have a few extra smart features just to sweeten the deal…