Efficiency

Effects of Imported Images on Visio File Size

April 12, 2008 By Visio Guy 15 Comments

You can quickly create detailed shapes by importing images into Visio. If you don’t have time (or budget!) to make a detailed drawing of that special ThinkPad or iPhone or USB Stick shape that you’ve been craving, you can simply browse for an image, and insert it into Visio!

It’s a fairly simple matter that you can achieve via two ways: Choose the menu: Insert > Picture > From File… or: Copy an image from an image-editor or image-viewing program and paste it into a Visio page. Simple indeed!

But what happens to Visio file sizes when you import images?

Does Visio compress famously-large BMP files on import, or will the .vsd become huge itself? Will we get significant savings by importing JPG or PNG files as opposed to straight-bitmaps?

Well today, we ran a few tests to see what happens!

Making Shapes More Efficient: Using Fewer Shapes & Groups

March 28, 2008 By Visio Guy 4 Comments

You may have read our recent post on Cisco IP Telephone Shapes, and perhaps downloaded the shapes. While give-aways and freebies are nice, we at Visio Guy like to go further. We like look behind-the-scenes and talk about Visio development-related issues in order to give our readers a deeper understanding.

Before we released the Cisco IP Telephone shapes, we performed a number of tweaks to make them more efficient and better behaved. This article discusses a few of those operations–the whys and hows of making your shapes more efficient, and some tricks for ensuring proper resize behavior!