Features

Punish Your Users with (not so) SmartShapes That Misbehave

June 14, 2008 By Visio Guy 6 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…

Word Balloon Visio SmartShape

May 29, 2008 By Visio Guy 17 Comments

For quite some time now, I’ve wanted to create a Visio SmartShape of a proper, oval, comic-style Word Balloon shape.

But calculating the intersection of a triangular callout with the perimeter of an ellipse was too foreboding…

…UNTIL NOW!

“Laser” Shape

May 8, 2008 By Visio Guy 7 Comments

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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

Oblique Connectors For Your 3D Diagrams

October 29, 2007 By Visio Guy 43 Comments

Visio network shapes have gone “3D”, but Visio connectors have decidedly not…

…unless you’re the guys behind the creation of the Zeus ZXTM Appliance Network Stencil. Several readers have noticed the cool isometric connectors that the KnowledgeHub guys used in their sample illustration, and want to get ‘hold of ’em.

We’re not sure where the KH folks got those connectors, but a little light bulb went * bing * inside our Visio Guy heads as we remembered yet another an unfinished prototype gathering dust on our HD. Ah yes, Oblique Connector.vsd, from long, long ago…

Free Visio People Shapes

May 20, 2007 By Visio Guy 43 Comments

Do you need people shapes to spruce up those Org-charts, workflow diagrams, or marketing slides? Are you tired of Visio’s outdated or distracting-and-overly-3D shapes? Then you’ve come to the right place!

Today Visio Guy offers its own version of the The Human Form. A subtly shaded, Fisher-Price-looking, person-pawn for your downloading pleasure. And of course, they have a few extra smart features just to sweeten the deal…

Map of World

April 23, 2007 By Visio Guy 58 Comments

Well, it’s been a while since any map-drawings have found their way to the Visio Guy blog-bits. And, judging by the messages I’ve been reading in the newsgroups, as well as personally receiving, there are a few more maps that you folks would like to see.

Since Mrs. Visio Guy and I are spending this year traveling around the world, it seemed appropriate that we offer up a map of the world for you to download!

So here we have it: in between hikes through rainforests, sky-diving adventures, and dolphin-watching tours, I’ve managed to produce a Visio drawing that shows all the countries of the world.

[Read more…] about Map of World

Audio Visual Components Shapes

December 15, 2006 By Visio Guy 16 Comments

Through the VGOBN (Visio Good Ol’ Boys Network) I recently received a finely-crafted Audio-Visual Shapes Visio stencil, full of shapes that you can use to layout your home theater wiring projects. The stencil is comprised of various terminal connectors, such as RCA Audio and RCA Video terminals, as well as various shapes for the back-plate and functional groups.

Many thanks to Tom Underhill for these shapes. Tom is a very smart engineer who used to work for Visio Corporation, and now does incredible things for Microsoft. You are welcome to send Tom praise and comments at “t-under-hill@g-mail.com” but remove all three of the hyphens first.

Circular Multi-arrows

October 9, 2006 By Visio Guy 108 Comments

Visio users have been requesting the ability to add more than five stinking arrows to the Circular Arrow shape. This shape, which comes with Visio, is found in Charts and Graphs > Marketing Diagrams stencil.

This article’s accompanying download offers an improved version of this shape. It allows you to add up to 20 arrows, automatically color them, and choose from 3 arrowhead styles!