In our last article on smart frames, we built a SmartShape that maintained a constant border-thickness, no matter the size of the shape.

It was a fairly simple frame, it got the job done, but it had a uniform frame-thickness all the way around, and offered no way for an end-user to change that thickness.

In this article, we’ll add some flexibility to the shape by making separate margin parameters for each side. We’ll also expose the margin settings to the user via Shape Data fields.

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UPDATE!

Hey football/soccer fans! We've got an update to our automated smart drawing for this years European Cup soccer tournament.

Perhaps you are familiar with the first version, which can be found here: European Cup 2008 Auto-Updating Diagram

Well, that version needed a few updates, most notably, the handling of games that are resolved with penalty-kicks, or shoot-outs.

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If you create elevation drawings for rack systems, for cabinetry, for A/V systems with TVs and video monitors, or for walls with doors and windows, you'll find yourself needing frame shapes.

And while your equipment may come in different sizes, the frames should maintain consistency when they are stretched.

For example, you may have several sizes of monitor: 19-inch, 21-inch, 48-inch, etc. Even though the picture gets bigger, the bezel around the display stays the same thickness. You get more display area, not more plastic!

A Visio SmartShape offers an elegant way to depict these objects. With a little bit of ShapeSheet programming, you can make one shape that can do the job of several!

We'll call these shapes Smart Frames. This article is the first installment in a series about creating and understanding Smart Frame shapes in Visio! So enjoy this article and stay tuned in the future!

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You can learn a lot from bad examples.

Call it learning-from-our-mistakes, anti-patterns, or devilish fun, there's a lot to be gained by looking at how-not-to-do-it.

Those of us over 30 might remember our first introduction to BASIC programming, taught to us by our friend Jeff, in the electronics corner at the local super market. While Mom was shopping, Jeff went over to the Commodore Vic 20 demo kiosk and typed the following lines:

10 PRINT "Chris is a turkey!"
20 GOTO 10

Utterly useless, except for the fact that it forever singed into our memory the ideas of branching and infinite loops...

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Visio is a natural choice for creating brackets for sports tournaments.

I have seen many elimination-tournament diagrams created in Visio over the years. In fact, just a few years ago, a very nice example was done for the 2006 World Cup. You can get it at Office Online here: 2006 World Cup Bracket.

But the trouble with these diagrams is that they require *gasp* manual input of data, or user-movement of shapes. The horror!

Well this year, that is all going to change...

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If you've ever drawn arcs in Visio, then grouped them together with other shapes, you may have noticed that they behave rather oddly on resizing. As you make the group bigger or smaller, the arcs may bow or squish in ways that you didn't expect.

This problem arises because of the interaction style of the arc shapes, which is 1D. Visio has two interaction styles: 1D and 2D. They have to do with the green handles you see on the shape, and how you go about manipulating the shape with the mouse.

In this article, we'll describe the difference between the two interaction styles, and explain how to correct resizing problems you might be encountering.

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Visio has tons of keyboard shortcuts, including modifiers for constraining the resizing and moving of shapes. For instance, with the Shift key depressed, you can constrain a shape to move only vertically or horizontally. Neat-o!

But unless I have totally missed something (which does occur occasionally), there is one feature that Visio could really use: the ability to resize shapes on-center.

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Whether you're a Visio end-user creating measured drawings, or you're developing a Visio solution with customized Visio shapes, at some point, you'll want to know how big your shapes are, and how to precisely resize them.

There are several ways to do this, and many of them allow you to edit the data as well. Today's post offers a run-down of the many ways that you can edit and view the size of your Visio shapes!

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Recently we were introduced to the Cisco IP Telephone Shapes, and learned how they could be improved in the article: Making Shapes More Efficient: Using Fewer Shapes & Groups.

Today we're going to focus on what happens when the Cisco shapes get resized, and discuss a technique for making the lineweight proportional to the size of the shape.

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You may have read our recent post on Cisco IP Telephone Shapes, and perhaps downloaded the shapes. While give-aways and freebies are nice, we at Visio Guy like to go further. We like look behind-the-scenes and talk about Visio development-related issues in order to give our readers a deeper understanding.

Before we released the Cisco IP Telephone shapes, we performed a number of tweaks to make them more efficient and better behaved. This article discusses a few of those operations--the whys and hows of making your shapes more efficient, and some tricks for ensuring proper resize behavior!

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The easy answer to this questions is: two. A single-shape can have two colors in its fill: a Fill Color and a Pattern Color.

If you want more, you have to group separate, differently-colored shapes together. In fact getting more colors is one of the major reasons that shapes become groups in the first place.

But if two were the actual answer, well, this article would over.

You see, Visio-Guy-friend Saveen Reddy has been up to his usual tricks of pushing Visio beyond the obvious and into the intriguing...

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Getting text on a circle in Visio was always a pain until the Circular Text Generator (version 1) appeared on Visio Guy. V1 was evidently a big hit, but you wanted more! Version 2 adds some more control over text spacing and placement on the circle. So if you need to place Visio text on a circle, read on!

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Today's post, like the Visio Guy web-site, is all about creating smart graphics.

We're going to create an evergreen tree shape that fades as its size decreases. With this one single SmartShape you'll be able to illustrate an entire forest-scene that fades into the mist. And you won't have to format each tree individually.

You will learn how to cut Visio shapes into pieces and union the bits together to form new shapes. You'll learn how to add parameters to shapes, and fill them with Excel-like ShapeSheet formulas create sophisticated graphical behavior. And you'll create a context menu that resets the shape with a click of the mouse.

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A Visio newsgrouper recently pointed out that in Visio, inserted images have a different default text position than normal shapes. For images, the text is located at the bottom of the shape, and text "grows" downward.

This makes sense, since you usually don't want the text to obscure the image. But perhaps you shape developers out there in Internet Land might wish to have the same text behavior for your shapes!

In this article, we'll discuss how to do it by hand, and offer some VBA script to get the job done faster!

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OK, we've just about had enough! Between all the newsgroup posts, and John Marshall's nagging, it's time to do something about adding text to a circle in Visio. 'Til now, the standard response has been; "insert a Word Art object". But with Visio's SmartShape- and automation capabilities that just won't do! We ought to be able to build something cool--and more native to Visio. This article presents the first in a series of the Circular Text Generator! Read the rest of this entry »

Multi-shape capability is one of the qualities that make Visio SmartShapes something special. A single shape can alter its appearance at the click of a context-menu, or the change of a data value.

While Visio shapes are often vector based, you can also create Visio multi-shapes using images. Using the simple panning-and-cropping technique described in this article will help you to quickly build efficient image-based Visio multi-shapes! So if you have a set of icons just aching to become a SmartShape, read on!

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You may have noticed cool-looking, shiny ball shapes that pop-up now and again on Visio Guy. They have an attractive offset-radial fill effect, like the balls in the image on the left.

If you've played with Visio's Fill Format dialog, you'll know that good ol' Fill Pattern Number 40 will give you a nice-looking radial fill, but there doesn't seem to be a setting for getting it to be off-center. Well (once again) Visio Guy is here to show you how to work some black magic!

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A common question from budding Visio SmartShape developers is: "How do I get my text to resize with the shape?" Well, there are a few typical responses to that question, but this article focuses on a very simple method that you can use for text that does not change. So if you're building shapes with company logos, digital readouts, or something similar, then read on!

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We see quite often in Visio's newsgroups the question; "how do I get my font size to change with the size of my shape?" We'll tackle that issue with some nifty ShapeSheet formulas, and a bit of philosophizing. So pull up a chair and a warm cup of coffee...

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If you are using Microsoft Forefront Client Security, and are documenting it in your Visio network diagrams, or if you dig Visio's new Data Graphics features, or simply like brightly-colored, shiny new Visio shapes and then we've got an article and a download for you!

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An associate asked me the other day; "how do you add a number of months to a date?"

I thought this would be simple, because the ShapeSheet supports elapsed-time units in addition to date and time formats. With elapsed-time, you can manipulate quantities of time, so the problem seemed fairly easy.

Well, not exactly... Read the rest of this entry »

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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