Smart graphics for visual people
It’s easy to use Visio and not notice some of the things that make it a great diagramming application.
One great feature is how shapes resize–or more aptly–how parts of shapes resize. If you’ve wondered about the term “SmartShapes”, this is an area where Visio shapes are truly smart.
So let’s take a visual tour and see how Visio SmartShapes do intelligent resizing that saves you time and improves your diagrams.
[Read more…] about Why Visio Shape Smarts Makes Your Life Easier
UPDATE!
Hey football/soccer fans! We’ve got an update to our automated smart drawing for this years European Cup soccer tournament.
Perhaps you are familiar with the first version, which can be found here: European Cup 2008 Auto-Updating Diagram
Well, that version needed a few updates, most notably, the handling of games that are resolved with penalty-kicks, or shoot-outs.
[Read more…] about European Cup 2008 Auto-Updating Visio Diagram (v2)
Visio is a natural choice for creating brackets for sports tournaments.
I have seen many elimination-tournament diagrams created in Visio over the years. In fact, just a few years ago, a very nice example was done for the 2006 World Cup. You can get it at Office Online here: 2006 World Cup Bracket.
But the trouble with these diagrams is that they require *gasp* manual input of data, or user-movement of shapes. The horror!
Well this year, that is all going to change…
[Read more…] about European Cup 2008 Auto-Updating Visio Diagram
David Edson of long-time Visio fame, and currently of Visibility.biz, recently sent us a high-quality Visio rendition of the Periodic Table to share with you.
You’ll want to note that this download is more than just a static diagram! You can use it as an interactive reference, because each SmartShape contains extra information about each chemical element. And you can even right-click each element to link to the Wikipedia entry about each substance!
[Read more…] about Do You Know Your Elements? A Visio Periodic Table
Recently, Matt R asked about a Visio Bingo Template for his marketing team. I thought to myself, “Now there’s a mission-critical application of Visio!”
Well actually, it was a ShapeSheet challenge. I wanted to make a card that allowed the user to randomly update the numbers, but without using any code.
The resulting bingo card shape is implemented entirely using the ShapeSheet. There’s no VBA code behind the number generation, so you don’t have to worry about any VBA Macro Security issues.