Visio Guy

You can quickly create detailed shapes by importing images into Visio. If you don't have time (or budget!) to make a detailed drawing of that special ThinkPad or iPhone or USB Stick shape that you've been craving, you can simply browse for an image, and insert it into Visio!

It's a fairly simple matter that you can achieve via two ways: Choose the menu: Insert > Picture > From File... or: Copy an image from an image-editor or image-viewing program and paste it into a Visio page. Simple indeed!

But what happens to Visio file sizes when you import images?

Does Visio compress famously-large BMP files on import, or will the .vsd become huge itself? Will we get significant savings by importing JPG or PNG files as opposed to straight-bitmaps?

Well today, we ran a few tests to see what happens!

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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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