SmartShapes

Crayon Network Shapes

August 11, 2008 By Visio Guy 11 Comments

Daily graphics have improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years. Visio comes with lots of attractive isometric and 3D network shapes. Office 2007’s Smart Art lets you make even the most boring info chunks jump off the page.

But sometimes this sophistication can be distracting. If your audience are newbies, complicated graphics can make your subject seem complicated.

One Visio Guy reader, Don Harris, decided to do something about it. Don recently approached me with a really nice set of network shapes that he calls: Crayon Network. He wanted to share his creation with other Visio fans, so I offered to wrap them in an article…

How to Build Smart Frames and Bezels #2

July 12, 2008 By Visio Guy 1 Comment

In our last article on smart frames, we built a SmartShape that maintained a constant border-thickness, no matter the size of the shape.

It was a fairly simple frame, it got the job done, but it had a uniform frame-thickness all the way around, and offered no way for an end-user to change that thickness.

In this article, we’ll add some flexibility to the shape by making separate margin parameters for each side. We’ll also expose the margin settings to the user via Shape Data fields.

Go 3D with Free Isometric Piping Shapes for Visio

June 25, 2008 By Visio Guy 63 Comments

Attention process engineers!

Calling all techies who work in:

– Oil refineries
– Water treatment facilities
– Any plant that produces a product in liquid form!

For years one of Japan’s top Visio experts, Junichi Yoda, has offered his 3D Isometric Piping shapes to download for free. I’ve long loved these shapes (having studied mechanical engineering myself), and have put off far showcasing them on Visio Guy for far, far too long!

European Cup 2008 Auto-Updating Visio Diagram (v2)

June 21, 2008 By Visio Guy 2 Comments

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.

Visio Microphone Shape

June 18, 2008 By Visio Guy 4 Comments

Wapperdude submitted this “mike” shape to Visio Guy, for us to pass on to our readers.

According to WD, the inspiration came as follows: I saw a request for audio symbols in the Visio forum, had this dumb 1998 mike shape, sent it to school and now it’s smarter.

So for you A/V folks out there in Visio Land, here’s a new SmartShape for your diagramming enjoyment!

How to Build Smart Frames and Bezels #1

June 15, 2008 By Visio Guy 4 Comments

If you create elevation drawings for rack systems, for cabinetry, for A/V systems with TVs and video monitors, or for walls with doors and windows, you’ll find yourself needing frame shapes.

And while your equipment may come in different sizes, the frames should maintain consistency when they are stretched.

For example, you may have several sizes of monitor: 19-inch, 21-inch, 48-inch, etc. Even though the picture gets bigger, the bezel around the display stays the same thickness. You get more display area, not more plastic!

A Visio SmartShape offers an elegant way to depict these objects. With a little bit of ShapeSheet programming, you can make one shape that can do the job of several!

We’ll call these shapes Smart Frames. This article is the first installment in a series about creating and understanding Smart Frame shapes in Visio! So enjoy this article and stay tuned in the future!

Punish Your Users with (not so) SmartShapes That Misbehave

June 14, 2008 By Visio Guy 5 Comments

You can learn a lot from bad examples.

Call it learning-from-our-mistakes, anti-patterns, or devilish fun, there’s a lot to be gained by looking at how-not-to-do-it.

Those of us over 30 might remember our first introduction to BASIC programming, taught to us by our friend Jeff, in the electronics corner at the local super market. While Dad was shopping, Jeff went over to the Commodore Vic 20 demo kiosk and typed the following lines:

1 2	10 PRINT "Chris is a turkey!" 20 GOTO 10

10 PRINT "Chris is a turkey!"
20 GOTO 10

Utterly useless, except for the fact that it forever singed into our memory the ideas of branching and infinite loops…

European Cup 2008 Auto-Updating Visio Diagram

June 9, 2008 By Visio Guy 22 Comments

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…

“Laser” Shape

May 8, 2008 By Visio Guy 7 Comments

Read Full Article

Recently, I was digging through some old projects, when I stumbled upon a Visio SmartShape that is loads of fun, and perhaps even slightly useful!

Years ago, I created a demo for one of Microsoft’s marketing groups. One of the shapes is a laser show projection shape and was used in a scaled drawing of a baseball stadium that was to be configured for a software trade show party rock concert.

If you do any kind of system integration, especially stage-layout, event wiring diagrams or something similar, you might find this shape useful. But that’s not the interesting part…

[Read more…] about “Laser” Shape

Center-sizing Smart Shapes

April 15, 2008 By Visio Guy 6 Comments

Visio has tons of keyboard shortcuts, including modifiers for constraining the resizing and moving of shapes. For instance, with the Shift key depressed, you can constrain a shape to move only vertically or horizontally. Neat-o!

But unless I have totally missed something (which does occur occasionally), there is one feature that Visio could really use: the ability to resize shapes on-center.