Archives for October 2008

Make Your Text Stand Out!

October 31, 2008 By Visio Guy 7 Comments

For a long time, I’ve been wondering: what makes a color dark and what makes a color light?

I’ve been wondering this because I wanted to know, quantitatively, why I sometimes need white text and other times need black text in order to make a shape readable.

If you are designing shapes that use lots of color, or that are intended to be used with Visio 2007’s color-by-value data graphics feature, you might be wondering the same thing.

And if you are looking to construct a ShapeSheet formula that automatically selects a text color based on the background color of a shape, then you might really be wondering about this!

Well recently, I stumbled upon a solution!

Title Blocks #1: How to Display Existing Document Information

October 21, 2008 By Visio Guy 34 Comments

Title blocks on drawings are important for many, many reasons.

If your company has created more than a small number of drawings, it’s useful to know who created them, when they were created, who updated the drawings, and when they were updated.

Often times, copies of a drawing are e-mailed or sent in printed form to customers, installers, contractors, builders, inspectors. For these recipients, contact information and drawing scale data can be of utmost importance.

As it turns out, much of the information that is imperative to title blocks is already in the drawing. Through Visio’s SmartShape features, it can automatically be extracted, eliminating the need to re-key it.

Other information that is not available by default can be entered in a central location, or extracted from existing data sources, then displayed by cleverly-constructed title block shapes.

This article is a first in a series on how you can use Visio’s built-in features, ShapeSheet capabilities and even automation code to make smart Title Block shapes that save you work.

Add Personality to Your Visio Drawings With People Faces

October 21, 2008 By Visio Guy 7 Comments

We’ve got more people-related shapes for you today!

The traffic on the other Visio people shape posts has been quite good, so we thought we’d help you add some character and emotion to your diagrams with a brand new set of face shapes!