Visio Guy

Attractive, realistic-looking Visio equipment shapes don't have to be heavy and inefficient.

In this article, we’ll look at some innovative A/V equipment shapes from D-Tools that offer the win-win scenario of good-looking and light weight.

We’ll tear these SmartShapes apart and show how you can use custom line patterns and creative shadow techniques to add pizzazz to your shapes, without adding bloat!

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Wapperdude submitted this "mike" shape to Visio Guy, for us to pass on to our readers.

According to WD, the inspiration came as follows: I saw a request for audio symbols in the Visio forum, had this dumb 1998 mike shape, sent it to school and now it's smarter.

So for you A/V folks out there in Visio Land, here's a new SmartShape for your diagramming enjoyment!

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Recently, I was digging through some old projects, when I stumbled upon a Visio SmartShape that is loads of fun, and perhaps even slightly useful!

Years ago, I created a demo for one of Microsoft's marketing groups. One of the shapes is a laser show projection shape and was used in a scaled drawing of a baseball stadium that was to be configured for a software trade show party rock concert.

If you do any kind of system integration, especially stage-layout, event wiring diagrams or something similar, you might find this shape useful. But that's not the interesting part...

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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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One of our Visio Guy readers recently sent us some very well-drawn shapes for Cisco IP Telephone buttons. Let's all send a warm thank you very much to Art Braune for adding to the quality and usefulness of this site!

Art told me he would send me a blurb, describing how he uses the shapes, but I thought I'd take a guess. After quickly Google-ing for Cisco IP Telephone, but without reading too much, I surmised that this thing is highly customizable. So it would make sense that IT departments would want to document how they had modified the phone, then send out a quick-reference card (or booklet) to company employees.

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Through the VGOBN (Visio Good Ol' Boys Network) I recently received a finely-crafted set of Audio-Visual Shapes that you can use to layout your home theater wiring projects. The set is comprised of various terminal connectors, such as RCA Audio and RCA Video terminals, as well as various shapes for the back-plate and functional groups.

Many thanks to Tom Underhill for these shapes. Tom is a very smart engineer who used to work for Visio Corporation, and now does incredible things for Microsoft. You are welcome to send Tom praise and comments at "t-under-hill@g-mail.com" but remove all three of the hyphens first.

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