Programming

Visio Snowflake Generator

November 2, 2006 By Visio Guy 4 Comments

Image of Visio Guy with snow on head Well folks, it’s snowing here at Visio Guy Headquarters in Munich! So I guess it’s time to start thinking winter after all. And that’s just what this article and download are all about: Winter! Visio and Winter! Visio and Winter and Snowflakes!

So let’s forget about BPM, Org Charts and Network Diagrams for a while, and hark back to the winters of our youth, when we’d busily be folding paper and cutting away triangular bits, in the mad pursuit to decorate our windows with paper snowflakes.

I’ve coddled together a little tutorial that shows you how to use Visio’s Fragment, Union, Combine and Trim functions to create snowflakes — “ just like you did back in kindergarten! And the download contains some Visual Basic for Applications code to help you “do the unfolding” automatically!

Spiral Shape Maker

October 19, 2006 By Visio Guy 28 Comments

Ever need a spiral shape? I just found one buried on my hard-drive — something I whipped up years ago, and modified last year. You can download it here.

The download consists of one Visio drawing file (.vsd). This file contains VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) macro-code that generates the spirals. You’ll need to allow this code to run in order to create spirals.

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Create Visio Flowcharts Programmatically

September 13, 2006 By Visio Guy 48 Comments

I hear quite often the question; “How do I do something in Visio programmatically?” Since many of those requests pertain to flowcharts and organizational charts, I thought I’d conjure up a fairly simple example that illustrates the creation of a flowchart with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code.

This isn’t the simplest example, because I thought it would be important to show how a decision-branch might be handled.

The Hidden World of Visio Shapes

September 5, 2006 By Visio Guy 86 Comments

So you’ve created beautiful graphics in Visio, and you know how to add phantasmal ShapeSheet smarts to your shapes, now its time for you to make it all disappear! I often get asked how to toggle the visibility of various elements of Visio drawings, and I usually offer up one of many solutions. But I don’t think that those many solutions have ever been cataloged in a single place. Until, of course, now…