For quite some time now, I've wanted to create a Visio SmartShape of a proper, oval, comic-style Word Balloon shape.

But calculating the intersection of a triangular callout with the perimeter of an ellipse was too foreboding...

...UNTIL NOW!

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Relatives ask me now and again if That Visio software can help me make quilting patterns?. I start to answer Well, maybe... and then we get side-tracked by family gossip and questions about When ya moving home?, etc, so nothing ever comes of it.

Between my relative's inquiries and the decent traffic for the article: Visio for Fashion Design?, this seems to be a niche with more than passing interest.

On a recent trip to the Great Northwest and the Land of Microsoft, the sewing question arose yet again, but this time I had a large swath of fabric at my disposal.

The wheels in my head started turning...

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David Parker, of bVisual Ltd, has created a really cool map of the UK's counties and boroughs, and released it for download. Have a look at the article here: UK Counties and Boroughs Map Shapes for Visio.

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Vienna, Austria—As spring comes to the Danube river valley, the green in the hills isn’t the only sign of reprieve from the long, dark winter. Employees of Visio Guy, an internet-based firm, also sighed relief—and jumped for joy—as the final judgment in a bitter lawsuit came down.

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Recently, Matt R asked about a Visio Bingo Template for his marketing team. I thought to myself, "Now there's a mission-critical application of Visio!"

Well actually, it was a ShapeSheet challenge. I wanted to make a card that allowed the user to randomly update the numbers, but without using any code.

The resulting bingo card shape is implemented entirely using the ShapeSheet. There's no VBA code behind the number generation, so you don't have to worry about any VBA Macro Security issues.

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I've been playing with Visio 2007's new Data Graphics features more and more lately, and have been getting all sorts of ideas for new Data Graphics to share with Visio Guy readers.

One day, I was staring at the Ratings Data Graphic Item that ships as one of Visio's standard Data Graphic elements...

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If you are developing solutions for Visio, then you've probably dabbled with VB code in Visio's Visual Basic for Applications editor. If you've been in the industry as long as I have, then you know that VB means Visual Basic. Period. End of story. But if you happen to also be from Australia, then it's a different story...

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Well folks, this Visio Guy and his main squeeze have been busily preparing for a year abroad, where we'll be sharing our Visio knowledge with you from exotic locations such as Fiji, New Zealand, Australia and Asia. Now you can understand why we'be been preparing all those Geographic Map Drawings!

With all this stress of packing, preparation, and the wrapping-up of projects, we're seriuosly due for some humor. And when you are a Visio Guy, nothing says "laugh" like a good flowchart!

Mr. Brian Briggs over at BBSpot.com has created this hilarious Windows Vista Upgrade Decision Flowchart. We're crossing our fingers that he's created it with Visio...perhaps even with Visio 2007...and on a freshly installed Vista workstation to boot. Not only would that make this masterpiece more pertinent to our website, but it would somehow throw some irony onto his sarcastic bonfire!

This chart is currently only available in .pdf or .jpg format, but we've made a call to the creator for some historic background, and if we're lucky, maybe the original .vsd!

View: Windows Vista Upgrade Decision Flowchart

Edit: I've committed heresy! The BBSpot guys said the flowchart was created with SmartDraw!