Smart graphics for visual people
Yay! It’s the weekend! Everyone’s checking facebook to see where Friday beer garden will be. And even if you’re not a facebook user, news of their IPO has surely crossed your browser. Ah, another bunch of filthy rich, young nerds in the valley! Enjoy those expensive Lego Technic and Mindstorms kits you can now afford, guys. You’ve earned them!
“But Visio Guy”, you may ask, “what does this have to do with Visio?”
Today, we continue with the movie-trilogy theme, but concentrate on advanced tips for importing and working with multiple shapes automatically.
This is the third and final piece in our trilogy of articles on Visio data graphics and data-linking.
Today we’re going to talk about adorning Visio shapes with data graphics, and the extreme flexibility that Visio data graphics offer.
This is slightly different than what we discussed previously in Trilogy-meter Data Graphics Part I. In that article, we linked data to shapes that were built specifically to be info-graphics.
This time around, we’ll apply info-graphics to shapes that already exist…and we’ll stay out of the ShapeSheet while we are doing it!
Today, Visio Guy will show you how to create a three-bar SmartShape and link it to data using Visio 2007 Professional’s brilliant “Link Data to Shapes” feature.
We’ll cover the intricacies of creating a shape that visually reacts to data, and show you how to link instances of this shape to actual rows of data in an Excel spreadsheet!
This is the first in a three-part series on data graphics and data linking, so read-on, and stay tuned!
I’ve been playing with Visio 2007’s new Data Graphics features more and more lately, and have been getting all sorts of ideas for new Data Graphics to share with Visio Guy readers.
One day, I was staring at the Ratings Data Graphic Item that ships as one of Visio’s standard Data Graphic elements…
If you are using Microsoft Forefront Client Security, and are documenting it in your Visio network diagrams, or if you dig Visio’s new Data Graphics features, or simply like brightly-colored, shiny new Visio shapes and then we’ve got an article and a download for you!
Visio 2007 has many cool new features, and among the coolest are Data Linking and Data Graphics. These data features allow shapes to link to data-sources and graphically react to it. You can also add Data Callouts as adornments to existing shapes. The callouts display data next to a shape without visually changing the actual shape.
Of course, if you’re a Visio Guy like me, you won’t be content to sit back and use the pre-built Data Graphics supplied by The Man. You’ll want to roll up your sleeves and create your own, thank you very much.
So I’ve scoured the net to find resources that contain the nitty-gritties about Data Graphics. Have a look, and stay up all night!
This morning I was thumbing through one of Edward R. Tufte’s books, and I got this idea for a “12-month bar shape” — a shape that shows vertical bars for each month of the year, in a compact, easy-to-read format. My original thought was that it would make a perfect Visio 2007 Data Graphic!
So, without thinking, planning, or researching, I plunged ahead creating the details of the shape, and then realized that making a Data Graphic is more complicated than I thought. Ugh!
Nevertheless, I’ve created a shape, which displays bar-graphics for 12 months of the year, and which links to external data. Perhaps you’ll find it useful!