Smart graphics for visual people
While it is possible to create good looking graphics with Visio, it was not designed to be an illustration tool. That doesn’t seem to stop nuts like me from trying to use it as one! But let’s just say that in my quest to create beauty, I occasionally miss the advanced tool or two.
One such example is the skew tool. With a skew tool you could, for example, easily draw nice rectilinear shapes, such as these dice faces…
A few weeks ago, I uploaded the map of Europe Visio diagram. This file provided convenient access to all the shapes of Europe, all neatly arranged relative to one another, living in harmony with peace and unity. Alle Menschen werden Brüder… Today we have the same pain-free (ie: no Shape Search) treatment for North America.
AND, we finally have a short post from the VisioGuy!
Every once in a while, a question comes along in the newsgroups that just screams at me; “WRITE SOME SAMPLE CODE!” Now I can’t describe exactly which types of questions speak to me in this way. Perhaps they’re questions I’ve heard time and again? Or they involve a fascinating graphical problem? Or is it just that I can actually finish them in one evening’s work?Whatever the reason, the latest question is; “How do I export all of the pages in a Visio document to image files?”
I hear quite often the question; “How do I do something in Visio programmatically?” Since many of those requests pertain to flowcharts and organizational charts, I thought I’d conjure up a fairly simple example that illustrates the creation of a flowchart with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code.
This isn’t the simplest example, because I thought it would be important to show how a decision-branch might be handled.
So you’ve created beautiful graphics in Visio, and you know how to add phantasmal ShapeSheet smarts to your shapes, now its time for you to make it all disappear! I often get asked how to toggle the visibility of various elements of Visio drawings, and I usually offer up one of many solutions. But I don’t think that those many solutions have ever been cataloged in a single place. Until, of course, now…
Every once in a while, folks ask about map shapes in Visio. Does Visio have countries and continents? Yes? Well, where on earth (pun intended) are they?
Visio has had map shapes for a long time, but it has become increasingly difficult to find them. First, some of the shapes got moved into the shape database. That means they are no longer in a stencil, but must be found by running a Shape Search. And we all know that search can be less than perfect at times.