random

‘Indexed’ Shapes – for that Hand-drawn Look

August 20, 2008 By Visio Guy 34 Comments

A few ideas have been burning (another) hole in my head, and I just had to get them out.

I’ve wanted to build shapes that look hand-drawn for quite some time. Using random formulas in the ShapeSheet, each shape could have slight variations that make them look natural.

I’ve also wanted to make a set of shapes for creating simple graphs and charts. Not that this hasn’t been done before, but I wanted some simple shapes for illustrative purposes.

A few recent posts and articles finally drove me to it. I hope you find the results useful, interesting, and most importantly, amusing!

Crayon Network Shapes

August 11, 2008 By Visio Guy 11 Comments

Daily graphics have improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years. Visio comes with lots of attractive isometric and 3D network shapes. Office 2007’s Smart Art lets you make even the most boring info chunks jump off the page.

But sometimes this sophistication can be distracting. If your audience are newbies, complicated graphics can make your subject seem complicated.

One Visio Guy reader, Don Harris, decided to do something about it. Don recently approached me with a really nice set of network shapes that he calls: Crayon Network. He wanted to share his creation with other Visio fans, so I offered to wrap them in an article…

Release the Power of Visio Custom Line Patterns

March 3, 2008 By Visio Guy 8 Comments

If you have a need to create repeating graphical elements, then learning how to create custom line patterns in Visio is absolutely essential.

Visio custom line patterns offer a power and flexibility that will save time for both your end-users and your solution development effort. And your final product will have a refined and elegant look.

Recently, John Goldsmith of Visual Signals, UK posted two excellent articles about creating custom line patterns in Visio.

Lorem Ipsum – Visio IA Text Placeholder Shape

February 11, 2008 By Visio Guy Leave a Comment

Evidently, lots of designers are using Visio to layout pages. As you dig around on the web, you’ll bump into terms such as IA, Information Architecture, Storyboarding, and Wireframes. These all have to do with designing the look and feel of web pages or other documents.

If you’re doing any sort of page-layout design, you might be interested in quickly creating paragraphs and sections of dummy text that you can format according to the page’s style characteristics. So I thought it would be neat to design a Visio SmartShape that automatically repeats a chunk of text over and over, to speed up the process of laying out a page.

Visio Bingo Template

January 23, 2008 By Visio Guy 3 Comments

Recently, Matt R asked about a Visio Bingo Template for his marketing team. I thought to myself, “Now there’s a mission-critical application of Visio!”

Well actually, it was a ShapeSheet challenge. I wanted to make a card that allowed the user to randomly update the numbers, but without using any code.

The resulting bingo card shape is implemented entirely using the ShapeSheet. There’s no VBA code behind the number generation, so you don’t have to worry about any VBA Macro Security issues.

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