Smart graphics for visual people
Visio has tons of keyboard shortcuts, including modifiers for constraining the resizing and moving of shapes. For instance, with the Shift key depressed, you can constrain a shape to move only vertically or horizontally. Neat-o!
But unless I have totally missed something (which does occur occasionally), there is one feature that Visio could really use: the ability to resize shapes on-center.
The easy answer to this questions is: two. A single-shape can have two colors in its fill: a Fill Color and a Pattern Color.
If you want more, you have to group separate, differently-colored shapes together. In fact getting more colors is one of the major reasons that shapes become groups in the first place.
But if two were the actual answer, well, this article would over.
You see, Visio-Guy-friend Saveen Reddy has been up to his usual tricks of pushing Visio beyond the obvious and into the intriguing…
[Read more…] about How Many Fill Colors Can You Put on a Visio Shape?
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.
Today’s post, like the Visio Guy web-site, is all about creating smart graphics.
We’re going to create an evergreen tree shape that fades as its size decreases. With this one single SmartShape you’ll be able to illustrate an entire forest-scene that fades into the mist. And you won’t have to format each tree individually.
You will learn how to cut Visio shapes into pieces and union the bits together to form new shapes. You’ll learn how to add parameters to shapes, and fill them with Excel-like ShapeSheet formulas create sophisticated graphical behavior. And you’ll create a context menu that resets the shape with a click of the mouse.
Visio network shapes have gone “3D”, but Visio connectors have decidedly not…
…unless you’re the guys behind the creation of the Zeus ZXTM Appliance Network Stencil. Several readers have noticed the cool isometric connectors that the KnowledgeHub guys used in their sample illustration, and want to get ‘hold of ’em.
We’re not sure where the KH folks got those connectors, but a little light bulb went * bing * inside our Visio Guy heads as we remembered yet another an unfinished prototype gathering dust on our HD. Ah yes, Oblique Connector.vsd, from long, long ago…
It’s snowing here in Liezen, Austria and I don’t have proper winter clothing with me. So I thought I’d take advantage of this indoor time and finish up another over-drawn network shape and offer it to you, the Visio Guy Public.
Multi-shape capability is one of the qualities that make Visio SmartShapes something special. A single shape can alter its appearance at the click of a context-menu, or the change of a data value.
While Visio shapes are often vector based, you can also create Visio multi-shapes using images. Using the simple panning-and-cropping technique described in this article will help you to quickly build efficient image-based Visio multi-shapes! So if you have a set of icons just aching to become a SmartShape, read on!
[Read more…] about Visio Film Strip Shapes: Hurray for Hollywood!
A recent Visio newsgroup post asked about customizing the output files from Visio’s Save As Web feature. This rang a bell in the ol’ noggin, and I went searching for an old demo that exported a customized html page, with pop-up menus that displayed Custom Property (Shape Data) information.
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!
So we’ve had this experimental Visio drawing containing crude attempts at 3D states laying around since 1993. But we only had three states: Washington, Oregon and California. Well after a few years, a few new Visio features, and some wisdom gained, we’ve finally gotten off our butts and written a little code that helped us produce something a little more useful: an entire map of the USA, where each shape can be extruded into the vertical! [Read more…] about 3D Extruded Map of USA