Smart graphics for visual people
People really get excited about Visio when they see that SmartShapes can react visually to changing conditions.
Whether you change size or position, data stored with the shape, select a context menu item or double-click, a Visio shape can be built to show that something has changed.
A classic example of this is a simple rectangle that changes color when you extend it beyond a certain length…
Happy Inauguration Day 2009, to everyone who finds it happy!
And to those who don’t find it particularly happy…well you find something to be positive about.
Which brings me to the point of this article: a bit of Visio inauguration-day humor!
[Read more…] about Visio SmartShape for Inauguration Day 2009
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:
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…
[Read more…] about Punish Your Users with (not so) SmartShapes That Misbehave
As we travel around the world, we’re looking at maps every single day. And being a Visio Guy, this naturally causes ideas to formulate in the old noggin. You may have seen and enjoyed the various map downloads from Visio Guy, but today, we’ve got something a little bit different.
I hope you’ll get a kick out of today’s SmartShape: the Multi-Earth Shape. This little bugger lets you choose four views and four color schemes, all with a click of the mouse!
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…