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.
Code
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!
Visio Snowflake Generator
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!
Create Visio Flowcharts Programmatically
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
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…