A recent Visio newsgroup post asked about customizing the output files from Visio’s Save As Web feature. This rang a bell in the ol’ noggin, and I went searching for an old demo that exported a customized html page, with pop-up menus that displayed Custom Property (Shape Data) information.
Programming
Multi-Earth Shape
As we travel around the world, we’re looking at maps every single day. And being a Visio Guy, this naturally causes ideas to formulate in the old noggin. You may have seen and enjoyed the various map downloads from Visio Guy, but today, we’ve got something a little bit different.
I hope you’ll get a kick out of today’s SmartShape: the Multi-Earth Shape. This little bugger lets you choose four views and four color schemes, all with a click of the mouse!
Sales Force Automation With Visio
One of the areas in which Visio particularly shines is that of Sales Force Automation. With Visio, a rep can sit on-site with a customer, and visually spec out a system or an installation. The components in the Visio schematic can be linked to real product-data, and can be analyzed via code to generate bills-of-material and reports automatically.
On MSDN, I recently uncovered “oldie but goody” demo that shows off these capabilities. I created it for Visio 5.0, while I still worked for Visio Corp, and it still works with Visio 2003! The demo illustrates how a fictitious candy-manufacturing line might be laid out. Custom shapes represent general classes of equipment, and database links behind the shapes specify real-world items. With the click of a button, a Bill of Materials, is generated in an embedded Excel spreadsheet, sitting right on the page!
Run VBA Code When Documents Open
If you’ve dabbled with the VBA project that resides in Visio documents, then you’ve likely stumbled upon the Document object’s DocumentOpened event. This is a great place for running any initialization code that you might require, but there’s a better way…
VBA Macro Security
Macro security is an important topic for anyone who deals with automated Microsoft Office solutions. Since Visio and other Office documents can contain Visual Basic code that can perform potentially harmful operations, you need to understand a little bit about how to secure your system.
This article will inform you about the various security settings available forVisio 2003 and Visio 2007, so that you can more confidently enjoy the downloads and code samples that you’ll find on Visio guy.
Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Stencil
Microsoft has published a brand-spanking-new set of Visio shapes for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. You can download the stencil for free from Microsoft’s web-site and immediately get to work planning your next Exchange deployment. You’ll also amaze your co-workers with your unmatched graphic-abilities and non-boring PowerPoint slides!
Visio and Xml Conference Resources
Back in January 2006, I made a presentation at the Microsoft Office Visio Conference in Home-Sweet-Home Seattle. Good company, good information, and good fun was had by all! You can download plenty of excellent content from that conference, including PowerPoint slides and recorded presentations. Get it here: Visio Conference web site.
In my presentation, Working With Visio an Xml, our friend, Dr. Xml, proudly made his PowerPoint debut and won the crowd over. The presentation summary was…
Polyline Shape Maker
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.
Polygon Maker
Another question popped up on the newsgroup forums today asking about making polygon shapes in Visio. This triggered a neuron, and I was off like a flash to perform a search of my …\Visio directory.
Sure enough, I found “PolygonMaker 2002.vsd”, which I have prettied-up for presentation to you today…
Combo Box Table of Contents
Yet another newsgroup post caught my eye today. I’m not sure if I answered the guy’s actual question, but I had fun creating this example anyway.
Today’s sample shows you how to create a table of contents. This particular version lists the pages in a Visio document in a drop-down combo box that sits on a Visio page. Just select an item from the list, and Voila! You are sent to the corresponding page in the document!