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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If you have a need to create repeating graphical elements, then learning how to create custom line patterns in Visio is absolutely essential.

Visio custom line patterns offer a power and flexibility that will save time for both your end-users and your solution development effort. And your final product will have a refined and elegant look.

Recently, John Goldsmith of Visual Signals, UK posted two excellent articles about creating custom line patterns in Visio.

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The Geographic Map Shapes & Drawings are an extremely popular feature of this web-site. And since a lot of our readers speak German, or come from Germany, it seemed like this post was long overdue.

So today we present a map of Germany and it's states--the Bundesländer--as they are called in German.

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Sure you can import bitmaps and images for use as Visio shapes. But imports are always rectangular, and they can have unappealing or distracting backgrounds that you'd rather not look at. While Visio doesn't have a masking capability or an irregular-cropping feature, there is a technique that will allow you to get the same effect!

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If you use Visio for CAD-like purposes, you might need to make revisions or "AS-BUILT" modifications to your drawings from time to time. Often this is shown by drawing a squiggly cloud, or bubble, around the portion of the drawing that has been modified.

I've created three shapes for doing this that you can download here.

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