Development

New Book: Visio 2010 Rules, Validation & Business Process Diagramming

July 19, 2010 by Visio Guy 2 Comments

Visio 2010 Premium introduces powerful mechanisms for validating diagrams to insure graphical and semantic correctness. Not only does this feature allow end-users to check and correct their diagrams, it enables developers to create custom rule sets to validate corporate- or discipline-specific diagrams.

David Parker’s new book: Microsoft Visio 2010 Business Process Diagramming and Validation explains Visio diagram validation, the APIs behind it, and helps you to build tools to make it all easier!

Add Spice to Your Visio Skills With Randomization!

July 16, 2010 by Visio Guy 2 Comments

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Unfortunately, no one can be told what the ShapeSheet is. You have to see it for yourself.

Visio SmartShapes can be so much more than just clip-art. This is because the ShapeSheet allows shapes to behave in intelligent ways, carry data and react to that data.

One under-used, little-known function is RAND(), which allows you to add randomness to your drawings. Randomness can not only be “neat-o”, but also useful. Come in and see why!

Stress Test: Nesting “IF” Functions in the ShapeSheet

July 10, 2010 by Visio Guy 2 Comments

A Visio Guy forum member asked the question: “How many nested IF statements can I stuff into a ShapeSheet formula?”

“Good question!”, I thought and went off to investigate!

Visio 2010 Flowchart Shapes Get Smarter

July 1, 2010 by Visio Guy 10 Comments

Visio 2010’s flowchart shapes have gotten smarter.

See how they save you work when you add lots of text to them!

Jump to Any Page With Visio SmartShapes

June 24, 2010 by Visio Guy 26 Comments

Visio SmartShapes don’t aren’t just for enhancing your Visio diagrams. They can be put to work as tools too!

Find out how such a Shape Tool can help you navigate multi-page Visio documents with ease!

Using Visio 2010 Containers & Lists to Create Server Drilldowns with Excel Data

June 5, 2010 by Visio Guy 1 Comment

If you aren’t interested in using Visio 2010 for creating sophisticated network rack diagrams, then you probably should be.

Today, fellow Visio-fan Al Edlund tells you why he loves to do this, shares insights on the matter, demos solutions he built, and offers a complete VS 2010 project, written in VB.NET, to help you get started!

The code shows you how to get network data from Excel, how to use the new List and Container shapes in Visio 2010, and how to manipulate them programmatically. All this to make your network diagrams even more powerful and easy to use!

Get Web Hex Color Values from Visio Shapes

May 14, 2010 by Visio Guy 3 Comments

Web designers and AI folks need to know what colors they are using. And they need to know precisely.

Bright red, Fuchsia and Mauve just won’t do. They need exacting names like: #FF0000, #FF00FF and #E0B0FF.

Since more and more folks are using Visio for prototyping web sites and user interfaces, I thought it might be useful to create a SmartShape that displays the hexadecimal color value for a particular shape.

Visio 2010 Premium, Pro & Standard Add-ons List

May 5, 2010 by Visio Guy 3 Comments

Need to know EXACTLY what comes in which edition of Visio 2010?

We’ve compiled extensive lists of all the add-ons that ship with Visio 2010 Premium, Pro and Standard. Read below the fold to see if the features you need will be in the edition of Visio you plan on purchasing!

Download the New Visio 2010 SDK!

May 1, 2010 by Visio Guy 7 Comments

If you’re a Visio developer, then Christmas has arrived! The Visio 2010 Software Development Kit has just been made available as a free download from Microsoft.com.