Radial Elements Tool
If you create your own Visio shapes or make drawings that have elements arranged circularly, then you may have experienced frustration.
Visio has the tools to draw circular-arrays of objects, but learning to do it takes time. There are no direct “arrange stuff in circles” functions. You have to cleverly use other functionality to get the job done.
To make things easier for you and me, I invented the Radial Elements Tool solves some of these problems. With this tool, you can create circular arrays of customizable tick marks in seconds!
The easiest way to understand this shape is to watch the video. It has some non-conventional features, which might be confusing at first sight. But if you enjoy reading, a full explanation follows…
A Shape With Design Mode, Cool!
When you first behold the the Radial Elements Tool shape, you’ll notice the useful-looking right side, then you’ll wonder at the left side, which requires some explaining:
That frightening bundle of lines on the left represents the design area. The little yellow control handles let you specify the look of the tick marks. If we pull on the handles, we change the shape of all the marks simultaneously!
The faded gray version in the background shows what the shape would look like if we moved the handles to different locations. The five orthogonal crisscrossing lines serve as guides to show you the maximum size that a tick mark could occupy.
This illustration shows how the design area maps to the actual shape:
More on Tick Mark Design
The easiest way to understand is to download the Visio file and play with the shape. But if you’re enjoying a nice cup of coffee at your favorite locale, and don’t feel like proper computing right now, read on as I try and explain with pictures.
If the design area has a full-sized rectangle, that maps to a perfect wedge in the shape:
If we move the handles up to have a half-height rectangle, we get perfect wedges that form a ring:
If we make a wedge in the design area, then the wedges in the ring become even more…well…wedgey!
Features of the Radial Elements Tool
But wait, there’s more! The sharp eyed reader will have noticed different numbers of wedges in the shapes shown above. That’s because there are four more features that you can control via Shape Data fields.
Just open the dialog via View > Shape Data Window, and you’ll see them, just waiting for you to tweak:
- Items – specify from 2 to 20 tick marks around the circle
- Design Mode – turn the design area on and off
- End Caps – make the ends of each wedge square or arc-shaped
- Starting Angle - offset where the first wedge is drawn. With zero, the first wedge is centered on the right horizontal, at “3 o’clock”
Here are two variations, with all four properties changed in each example. This guy has seven items, Design Mode hidden, rounded end caps, and a starting angle of 25.7 degrees, which centers the gap between the last and first wedge at 3 o’clock:
Here we add more items, turn Design Mode on, make square end caps, and set the starting angle to zero:
Using the Radial Elements Tool to Design Shapes
Once you know how to control the shape, you can use it as part of more complicated shapes. When I create shapes with the tool, I usually don’t include the shape in it’s smartened form. Instead, I use the Boolean operations under the Shape > Operations menu to create something simpler.
To see what I’m talking about, check out the way I create a gear using the tool:
click to view larger image
The final gear shape can’t be configured any more. It has been lobotomized–it’s smarts lost forever. But the resulting shape is neatly and accurately drawn, is compact, and is ready to become an element in a more sophisticated graphic!
Example Shapes Built from the Radial Elements Tool
Here are some shapes that I quickly designed using the tool as a basis:
click to view larger image
Get the Radial Elements Tool
Ok, enough talk, here’s the download, so you can get to work!
Note: because this SmartShape uses User-defined ShapeSheet Functions, it can only be used with Visio 2007 or newer!
Visio Radial Elements Tool (148.84 KB) - downloaded: 418 
Any thought to allow user to drop a shape in the “square” and then the tool uses that shape to do the radial stuff.
Since “square” is present and assuming drop shape would be added to the “square” group, the tool could pick up the subshape and apply and user could alter the subshape (smaller/bigger) in the “square”) and apply it to the radial stuff.
Actually have a project where this might be very useful so glad this tool was created (did this manually and boy its tedious!!).
Wow. Impressive work Chris.
Very cool shape! The “Design mode” is quite clever and I love the visual nature of its configuration.
Thanks John! Glad to see you stopped by,
- Chris
Hi Ted,
For this tool, I wanted to make something that was “shape only”, that could then be blasted by fragment and union and used in other shapes. Shapes are so much more portable than code, and no one has to trust your VBA project.
But your idea is a good one. I could probably modify the Visio Network Server Shape Icon Customization Tool to get a “hot region” like you suggest.
You might also check out the Visio Snowflake Generator. This might do what you want already, although I think it only does 6 * 2 repetitions. 6 mirrored sets of your original element…
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