But getting shades of colors in rings isn’t built in. You end up having to make lots of concentric circles and giving them slightly different colors (along the grade, so to speak)

In illustration programs, they call this a blend, and Visio doesn’t have this capability built it. With automation, you can start to do it, but it’s not easy.

I’ll certainly be using this trick to produce heat maps for risks, etc. Any chance someone can work out how to do a circular one though, with, say, a red centre, going through graded concentric rings of orange and yellow to green at the outside?!

Here is an example of something i’d love to have: I work on multiple iterations of a network. I’d like to assign shapes and connectors to specific layers, or assign them custom properties so that a different drawing shows up in each tab of a document (i.e. each page). This way I can make a change on a earlier iteration and have it reflected in the later iteration. Is this possible?

I knew one project manager that was worried about what he called “cartoon syndrome”. That his developers would get sucked in to over-drawing every symbol, instead of, well, making them…symbols. So now I know what you’re talking about.

Oh, and are you talking about the book called “Visualizing Data”, per chance?

Cheers,

- Chris

I do however bow to your expertise, and don’t mean to knock it. But to me the real power is continuing to push the boundaries of data visualization and parametric shapes/drawings. If I had the expertise, or when I do, i guess I’ll start that blog. The new oreilly data visualization book shows the real limits of visio, and where it can go.

I’ve observed that with operating systems, applications, the web, heck, even laptops, you’ll see that ‘pretty’ IS big business. Look at Vista and the Mac OS. Gummy-bears, glass, and glitter all over the place.

On the web, you’ve got rich interaction, animation, transparency, and other effects, brought to you by Flash or Ajax or Silverlight or WPF.

I see no reason why Visio needs to miss this party.

While this post may look like pretty graphics, the parametric mechanisms behind the SmartShapes are applicable to all areas of visualization: BPM, Networking, Floor- and Space-plans, database diagrams, UML, web-design, etc..

More and more sophisticated data-visualization is being done in Visio, and a lot of those visuals utilize color. So one can dissect the FREE shapes in this FREE article and learn how to parametrically control color in Visio.

And if one doesn’t care about the technical aspects, users can use the download to quickly add a nice looking background to their diagram, and configure it with a few clicks. How many steps would that take in Illustrator?

It’s all potentially serious stuff, in a light and fun format.

And, not everybody wants to shell out 600 bucks for an application with a steep learning curve, and an obvious (and clunky) Mac interface.

Adobe Illustrator is a great product that has its place, and that seems to be with Graphic Artists who get paid to create stunning graphics. Visio fills a lot of gaps between high-end tools and pen + paper.

Please send us your ideas of what you’d like to see on this blog, either via the contact form on the About page, or in the Suggestion Box comments.

Cheers,

- Chris

I think most people want to see posts around parametric capabilities and using visio as a way of automating, not making more pretty. More pretty is nice, but to me and anyone I know it isn’t the most pressing thing. I’ve started to abandon visio in favor of graphviz frankly, much easier to actually integrate that with existing tools.