SmartShapes

Rack Unit Dimension Line

April 1, 2007 By Visio Guy 22 Comments

Many many years ago, when I worked at Visio Corporation, one of my projects was to create the dimension line shapes that you can still find to this day under File > Shapes > Visio Extras > Dimensioning – Architectural or Engineering.

After all the sweat and tears that went in to creating them, I came to affectionately call them: My Babies. In fact, I still claim them as dependants every April 15th, and will soon be searching for a suitable university for them to attend.

So when a forum question appears regarding Visio’s dimension lines, I’m naturally all ears. Recently, someone made an inquiry in the Visio general newsgroup about a dimension line that could display Rack Units…

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Stencil

December 28, 2006 By Visio Guy 5 Comments

Microsoft has published a brand-spanking-new set of Visio shapes for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. You can download the stencil for free from Microsoft’s web-site and immediately get to work planning your next Exchange deployment. You’ll also amaze your co-workers with your unmatched graphic-abilities and non-boring PowerPoint slides!

Zeus ZXTM Appliance Network Stencil

December 26, 2006 By Visio Guy 8 Comments

Zeus Technology produces software and hardware for advanced traffic management and application acceleration. If you’re working with Zeus’ products, you’ll probably want to map out your system from time to time.

Audio Visual Components Shapes

December 15, 2006 By Visio Guy 17 Comments

Through the VGOBN (Visio Good Ol’ Boys Network) I recently received a finely-crafted Audio-Visual Shapes Visio stencil, full of shapes that you can use to layout your home theater wiring projects. The stencil is comprised of various terminal connectors, such as RCA Audio and RCA Video terminals, as well as various shapes for the back-plate and functional groups.

Many thanks to Tom Underhill for these shapes. Tom is a very smart engineer who used to work for Visio Corporation, and now does incredible things for Microsoft. You are welcome to send Tom praise and comments at “t-under-hill@g-mail.com” but remove all three of the hyphens first.

Constraining Angle with the BOUND ShapeSheet Function

December 14, 2006 By Visio Guy 1 Comment

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.

Visio Advent Calendar

December 1, 2006 By Visio Guy 4 Comments

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!

Thinkpad Network Shape

November 24, 2006 By Visio Guy 19 Comments

If you’re an IBM ThinkPad fanatic like me and the folks over at forum.thinkpads.com — or used to be before Lenovo removed the red stripes from the buttons — then you’ll appreciate having a real laptop shape for your diagrams.

I’ve created a fully over-drawn ThinkPad laptop Visio network shape that’s sure to bloat your file sizes, but look really cool on your 2400dpi color laser printer. It’s got all the normal features of Visio’s network shapes: a whole slew of custom properties and text that can be moved via a little, yellow control handle.

Hope you enjoy it!

Download “ThinkPad Shape (Visio 2007)”

s!Aj0wJuswNyXlhw9PPe4iBX-iJHhT – Downloaded 7453 times – 103.00 B

Consumer Reports Rating Shape

November 22, 2006 By Visio Guy 4 Comments

Today’s post presents you with a Consumer Reports style ratings shape. The shape isÂ what is traditionally referred to as a multi-shape. It has five states that allow you to graphically represent the quality ofÂ a particular characteristic. Consumer Reports names the states: Excellent, Good, Average, Poor, or Unacceptable. In our shape you can configure the names to your liking.

Legend Shapes

November 20, 2006 By Visio Guy 37 Comments

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!

[Read more…] about Legend Shapes

USB Stick Shape

November 7, 2006 By Visio Guy 12 Comments

So Steve popped up on MSN Messenger a few months ago and told me he needed a USB stick shape that matched the cool 3D network shapes in Visio 2003.

Of course this was annoying — what am I? The Visio Guy? But then I remembered how he manages to save me big $$$ on my ThinkPads. And since I was chatting with him on a T43p, I figured it was the least I could do 🙂

Steve has enjoyed a competitive advantage — being the only person with this shape for many months — but now his patent has run out and I’m sharing it with you!

Download “USB Stick Visio Network Shape”

s!Aj0wJuswNyXlhjNjHeiqdd7GIFZA – Downloaded 9845 times – 103.00 B