Smart graphics for visual people
You may have noticed cool-looking, shiny ball shapes that pop-up now and again on Visio Guy. They have an attractive offset-radial fill effect, like the balls in the image on the left.
If you’ve played with Visio’s Fill Format dialog, you’ll know that good ol’ Fill Pattern Number 40 will give you a nice-looking radial fill, but there doesn’t seem to be a setting for getting it to be off-center. Well (once again) Visio Guy is here to show you how to work some black magic!
A common question from budding Visio SmartShape developers is: “How do I get my text to resize with the shape?” Well, there are a few typical responses to that question, but this article focuses on a very simple method that you can use for text that does not change. So if you’re building shapes with company logos, digital readouts, or something similar, then read on!
We see quite often in Visio’s newsgroups the question; “how do I get my font size to change with the size of my shape?” We’ll tackle that issue with some nifty ShapeSheet formulas, and a bit of philosophizing. So pull up a chair and a warm cup of coffee…
In this article, we share with you a dimension line SmartShape that can be calibrated to a scale on an imported image, and be subsequently used to measure distances in that space.
Since Visio is adept at importing images in a variety of formats, it can be a great time savings to start with an image as a background or basis for a diagram that you wish to produce. There are many scenarios where the imported art represents a scaled drawing, be it a map, a floor plan, or some other architectural drawing. [Read more…] about Map Distance Dimension Line
An associate asked me the other day; “how do you add a number of months to a date?”
I thought this would be simple, because the ShapeSheet supports elapsed-time units in addition to date and time formats.
With elapsed-time, you can manipulate quantities of time, so the problem seemed fairly easy.
Well, not exactly… [Read more…] about Month Math
Happy New Year 2007 Visio Fans!
Not only does the new year bring hope, rebirth, and a chance to start anew, but also a new version of Visio. Yes folks, Visio 2007 will soon be on the shelves, and beneath the shrink-wrap and behind the registration cards you’ll find an exciting new feature for ShapeSheet developers: the ability to define your own ShapeSheet functions!
By defining your own functions, you can really reduce the clutter and repeated effort that can occur with complicated ShapeSheet functions.
[Read more…] about User-defined ShapeSheet Functions in Visio 2007
Cori who writes the blog Elliptical… wrote this nice little piece on constraining a shape’s angle so that it can only be rotated in 90-degree increments. I thought I’d relay the information to you here, and explain a bit more about the BOUND ShapeSheet function.
Although you can use the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+R and Ctrl+L to rotate shapes in 90-degree increments clockwise and counterclockwise, this does nothing to actually constrain the allowable values.
[Read more…] about Constraining Angle with the BOUND ShapeSheet Function
December is here and Christmas is near! What better way to celebrate than with your very own Visio Advent Calendar!
I’ve created a Visio file that’s full of all sorts of goodies. Just open the file every day from now until December 25th and you’ll get a new visual, Visio treat!
Sometimes your Visio SmartShapes can be like beauty pageant contestants: they just need to look good, but don’t need a lot of intelligence. The creators of Visio realized this (after five versions) and gave us a way to streamline lots of “dumb” vector data. The ShapeSheet function: POLYLINE and the geomettry row: PolyLineTo will help you get the job done.
If you’ve seen Visio 2003’s Legend shape, you know that it is very, very cool. It tallies the number of times that various masters have been dropped on the page.
But how do you enable your own shapes to work with it? That, my friends, is the subject of this post!