If you've dabbled with the VBA project that resides in Visio documents, then you've likely stumbled upon the Document object's DocumentOpened event. This is a great place for running any initialization code that you might require, but there's a better way...

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Macro security is an important topic for anyone who deals with automated Microsoft Office solutions. Since Visio and other Office documents can contain Visual Basic code that can perform potentially harmful operations, you need to understand a little bit about how to secure your system.

This article will inform you about the various security settings available forVisio 2003 and Visio 2007, so that you can more confidently enjoy the downloads and code samples that you'll find on Visio guy.

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In your quest to create a Visio-based application you're not likely to find yourself stranded on a Visio-based-island. You'll probably find yourself strolling through a land filled with other software products that need to join you on your journey.

So if your wanderings take you through the towns of Access, Excel, Active Directory, SQL Server, MOM, Exchange, Reporting Services, or SharePoint, then you've stopped at the right place to get directions!

The good citizens at Visimation have authored eight -- that's E-I-G-H-T-! -- articles to guide you on your path towards integrating Visio with Microsoft technologies...

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Visio 2007 has many cool new features, and among the coolest are Data Linking and Data Graphics. These data features allow shapes to link to data-sources and graphically react to it. You can also add Data Callouts as adornments to existing shapes. The callouts display data next to a shape without visually changing the actual shape.

Of course, if you're a Visio Guy like me, you won't be content to sit back and use the pre-built Data Graphics supplied by The Man. You'll want to roll up your sleeves and create your own, thank you very much.

So I've scoured the net to find resources that contain the nitty-gritties about Data Graphics. Have a look, and stay up all night!

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This morning I was thumbing through one of Edward R. Tufte's books, and I got this idea for a "12-month bar shape" -- a shape that shows vertical bars for each month of the year, in a compact, easy-to-read format. My original thought was that it would make a perfect Visio 2007 Data Graphic!

So, without thinking, planning, or researching, I plunged ahead creating the details of the shape, and then realized that making a Data Graphic is more complicated than I thought. Ugh!

Nevertheless, I've created a shape, which displays bar-graphics for 12 months of the year, and which links to external data. Perhaps you'll find it useful!

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Hello Visio Fans! I received a Visio Partner e-mail a few days ago that contains a fabulous set of links to Visio How-To demo videos. The demos cover new Visio 2007 topics such as DataGraphics, Themes, AutoConnect, PivotDiagrams and Vista integration.

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Well folks, the Missus and I have been traveling New Zealand's south island for the past few weeks, and I've finally found the time get online and offer up a new post.

The land is beautiful down here, and folks are very conscious of the environment. In the news, there's been lots of talk about generating power using the energy stored in ocean's waves and tidal flows. On the long train ride from Auckland to Wellington, I had a conversation with a guy about a simple power generator that works by anchoring a buoy to the ocean floor, and using the up-and-down motion caused by floating to generate electricity.

I had the idea to create a Visio diagram to illustrate how such a wave generator might work. Read the rest of this entry »

Happy New Year 2007 Visio Fans!

Not only does the new year bring hope, rebirth, and a chance to start anew, but also a new version of Visio. Yes folks, Visio 2007 will soon be on the shelves, and beneath the shrink-wrap and behind the registration cards you'll find an exciting new feature for ShapeSheet developers: the ability to define your own ShapeSheet functions!

By defining your own functions, you can really reduce the clutter and repeated effort that can occur with complicated ShapeSheet functions.

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Cori who writes the blog Elliptical... wrote this nice little piece on constraining a shape's angle so that it can only be rotated in 90-degree increments. I thought I'd relay the information to you here, and explain a bit more about the BOUND ShapeSheet function.

Although you can use the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+R and Ctrl+L to rotate shapes in 90-degree increments clockwise and counterclockwise, this does nothing to actually constrain the allowable values.

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Back in January 2006, I made a presentation at the Microsoft Office Visio Conference in Home-Sweet-Home Seattle. Good company, good information, and good fun was had by all! You can download plenty of excellent content from that conference, including PowerPoint slides and recorded presentations. Get it here: Visio Conference web site.

In my presentation, Working With Visio an Xml, our friend, Dr. Xml, proudly made his PowerPoint debut and won the crowd over. The presentation summary was...

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Sometimes your Visio SmartShapes can be like beauty pageant contestants: they just need to look good, but don't need a lot of intelligence. The creators of Visio realized this (after five versions) and gave us a way to streamline lots of "dumb" vector data. The ShapeSheet function: POLYLINE and the geomettry row: PolyLineTo will help you get the job done.

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Another question popped up on the newsgroup forums today asking about making polygon shapes in Visio. This triggered a neuron, and I was off like a flash to perform a search of my ...\Visio directory.

Sure enough, I found "PolygonMaker 2002.vsd", which I have prettied-up for presentation to you today...

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Today's post presents you with a Consumer Reports style ratings shape. The shape is what is traditionally referred to as a multi-shape. It has five states that allow you to graphically represent the quality of a particular characteristic. Consumer Reports names the states: Excellent, Good, Average, Poor, or Unacceptable. In our shape you can configure the names to your liking.

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If you've seen Visio 2003's Legend shape, you know that it is very, very cool. It tallies the number of times that various masters have been dropped on the page.

But how do you enable your own shapes to work with it? That, my friends, is the subject of this post!

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Yet another newsgroup post caught my eye today. I'm not sure if I answered the guy's actual question, but I had fun creating this example anyway.

Today's sample shows you how to create a table of contents. This particular version lists the pages in a Visio document in a drop-down combo box that sits on a Visio page. Just select an item from the list, and Voila! You are sent to the corresponding page in the document!

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Well the buzz about Visio 2007 is increasing daily, and all the hard-core Visio fans are already working on solutions for the next version of Visio. If you're itching to jump on the bandwagon, I've collected a set of links to point you towards as many Visio 2007 developer-related links as possible!

Enjoy!

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Well folks, it's snowing here at Visio Guy Headquartes in Munich! So I guess it's time to start thinking winter after all. And that's just what this article and download are all about: Winter! Visio and Winter! Visio and Winter and Snowflakes!

So let's forget about BPM, Org Charts and Network Diagrams for a while, and hark back to the winters of our youth, when we'd busily be folding paper and cutting away triangular bits, in the mad pursuit to decorate our windows with paper snowflakes.

I've coddled together a little tutorial that shows you how to use Visio's Fragment, Union, Combine and Trim functions to create snowflakes -- “ just like you did back in kindergarten! And the download contains some Visual Basic for Applications code to help you "do the unfolding" automatically!

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ECB asked in a recent newsgroup post:

"How can I make a 45° corner that maintains 45° when the shape resizes?"

Such a shape would be useful, for say, creating a "Document" shape. It's also the type of thing that the CAD-oriented folks might like to create, only they would call it a "chamfer".

In this article, we'll show you how to create such a shape with Visio's drawing tools, and to add the special behavior using Visio's ShapeSheet interface.

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How many of you remember waaay back to Visio 2000, when you could manipulate the type and direction of connection points via nifty UI handles? Well, that functionality was removed from Visio, but I've created a free tool that will give it back to you! Using a custom master shape and Visual Basic for Applications code, you can quickly get your 2D connection points in order!

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David Parker from over at bVisual stole the Viso Freak Crown with this newsgroup post a few days ago. His answer solves the problem of how to count the number Geometry Sections in the ShapeSheet, and it uses a really loooooooong ShapeSheet formula!

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If you work with different systems of units, you may have a need to convert ShapeSheet values to different units, without changing values. But when you Show Values in the ShapeSheet how can you specify exactly which units to use?

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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?"

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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.

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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...

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