1980 witnessed the launch of the classic arcade game Battlezone by Atari.

In 2007, Microsoft launched Visio 2007, which included the new Themes feature.

For 28 years, the two have been on a collision course with destiny...linked by computers, the Geek Factor...and Fate.

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If you are an Exchange administrator, you might have worked with Exchange Management tools. And while you might enjoy the power and flexibility of these tools, you might be missing the ability to get a graphical overview of user mailbox details.

Now, I'm not an Exchange administrator, but I get the feeling that this thing is probably pretty cool for those of you who are...

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Attention process engineers!

Calling all techies who work in:

- Oil refineries
- Water treatment facilities
- Any plant that produces a product in liquid form!

For years one of Japan’s top Visio experts, Junichi Yoda, has offered his 3D Isometric Piping shapes to download for free. I’ve long loved these shapes (having studied mechanical engineering myself), and have put off far showcasing them on Visio Guy for far, far too long!

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VBA in Visio is great for learning, prototyping and getting repetitive tasks done quickly. One problem I run into--when I’m not careful—is bloated code resulting from the copying and pasting of too many loops. But with the CallByName function in VBA, we can streamline our code! Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE!

Hey football/soccer fans! We've got an update to our automated smart drawing for this years European Cup soccer tournament.

Perhaps you are familiar with the first version, which can be found here: European Cup 2008 Auto-Updating Diagram

Well, that version needed a few updates, most notably, the handling of games that are resolved with penalty-kicks, or shoot-outs.

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Wapperdude submitted this "mike" shape to Visio Guy, for us to pass on to our readers.

According to WD, the inspiration came as follows: I saw a request for audio symbols in the Visio forum, had this dumb 1998 mike shape, sent it to school and now it's smarter.

So for you A/V folks out there in Visio Land, here's a new SmartShape for your diagramming enjoyment!

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If you create elevation drawings for rack systems, for cabinetry, for A/V systems with TVs and video monitors, or for walls with doors and windows, you'll find yourself needing frame shapes.

And while your equipment may come in different sizes, the frames should maintain consistency when they are stretched.

For example, you may have several sizes of monitor: 19-inch, 21-inch, 48-inch, etc. Even though the picture gets bigger, the bezel around the display stays the same thickness. You get more display area, not more plastic!

A Visio SmartShape offers an elegant way to depict these objects. With a little bit of ShapeSheet programming, you can make one shape that can do the job of several!

We'll call these shapes Smart Frames. This article is the first installment in a series about creating and understanding Smart Frame shapes in Visio! So enjoy this article and stay tuned in the future!

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You can learn a lot from bad examples.

Call it learning-from-our-mistakes, anti-patterns, or devilish fun, there's a lot to be gained by looking at how-not-to-do-it.

Those of us over 30 might remember our first introduction to BASIC programming, taught to us by our friend Jeff, in the electronics corner at the local super market. While Mom was shopping, Jeff went over to the Commodore Vic 20 demo kiosk and typed the following lines:

10 PRINT "Chris is a turkey!"
20 GOTO 10

Utterly useless, except for the fact that it forever singed into our memory the ideas of branching and infinite loops...

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Visio is a natural choice for creating brackets for sports tournaments.

I have seen many elimination-tournament diagrams created in Visio over the years. In fact, just a few years ago, a very nice example was done for the 2006 World Cup. You can get it at Office Online here: 2006 World Cup Bracket.

But the trouble with these diagrams is that they require *gasp* manual input of data, or user-movement of shapes. The horror!

Well this year, that is all going to change...

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Judging from the view-counter and download stats for our post: Free Visio People Shapes, people just love free people shapes!

Well let the love-fest continue!

We recently stumbled upon a Visio page from <Low Zorro Voice> El Visioso </Low Zorro Voice> and found a keeper that we'd like to share with you!

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Well Visio Fans, June is upon us, the weather is hot, and the UEFA European Cup 2008 is about to start!

Europe is going soccer crazy, and signs of Fußball-mania are everywhere! As I walk around Vienna, it's pretty hard not to notice these waving from store-fronts and car windows.

Of course Visio Guy wanted to get in on the football action, so we've drummed up some rabble-rousing, chest-pounding Visio shapes to fan the flames of nationalistic fervor!

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