John Goldsmith's visLog

Drawing RSS icons in Visio – Part 1

I was looking at an RSS icon the other day and thought it would make a good example of how to draw custom shapes in Visio.  You can, of course, use bitmap based images and save yourself all of the drawing, but if you want to include any interaction within the shape and if you want it to scale without degrading then the vector route is the one to choose. 

I’ll split this into two posts:- in the first I’ll look at a 2D icon and use the shape operations functionality and in the second, I look at a 3D icon and try and break down the shape in terms of its colours…

Embedding PDF and XPS files in Visio Save As Web output

There was a recent question in the newsgroups asking how you could print the correct drawing frame in Visio’s Save As Web output.  David Parker suggested including a PDF file in the process and creating a link to it, so I thought I’d look at one way of achieving this.

Building dynamic hyperlinks

Moving on from the previous post, where I looked at the basics of hyperlinks in Visio, today I’m going to consider how to build dynamic hyperlinks using the ShapeSheet.

I’ve thought up a couple of slightly contrived examples to demonstrate how this functionality might be applied but there are no doubt many other applications out there and I’d love to hear if you have other examples...

Using Visio hyperlinks

I thought I’d take a quick break from looking at the new features in Visio 2010 and turn to a topic that pops up fairly regularly in newsgroups – Hyperlinks...

Using Office 2010 Background Removal with Visio

I spotted a blog post the other day about a new feature in Office 2010 that enables you to ‘crop’ a subject out of an image.  The feature is called Background Removal and is part of Excel, PowerPoint and Word 2010:

• The magic of background removal – Office 2010 Engineering

The need for this type of functionality crops up in Visio from time to time and both Chris Roth and I have come up with mask workarounds for this in past:

• Super Mask Visio Clipping Shape – VisGuy.com
• Highlighting images using a mask - visLog

Visio 2010 – Custom context menus

You’ll have to forgive the poor menus analogy, but I get bored with the same old pictures…

Anyway, on with another new feature in Visio 2010 – Multi-level custom context menus.  The current and previous versions of Visio have allowed you to add custom menu items to the context menu of pages and shapes and if you haven’t done so yourself, you only need to right-click on some of the built-in shapes such as the ‘Flowchart shapes’ shape (in the Basic Flowchart Shapes stencil) to see them at work.  One limitation, however, has been the inability to group the menu items into any kind of hierarchy.  Basically, all menu items that you add, get placed at the top level.  Visio 2010 changes that…

Link (size) data to shapes

Just off the 2010 track for a second, this is a quick post in response to a newsgroup question about how to link size data, in a spreadsheet, to the shapes in a Visio 2007 document.  (Note that the Link data to shapes functionality is only available in Visio 2007 Professional.)

Visio 2010 – Save As Silverlight

Continuing my review of some of the new features in Visio 2010, today I’m going to look at some exciting functionality that enables you to save your diagrams out to Silverlight…

Visio 2010 – ShapeSheet Intellisense and formula editing

I’ve been getting my hands dirty with the new Technical Preview of Visio 2010 and it’s got some great new features.  In no particular order, I’m going to start off with a couple of new ShapeSheet features that have caught my eye...

Simple Visio Bullet Graph

Well, moving on from the Sparkline shape in my previous post, this time I thought I’d look at how to go about building a Bullet Graph using Visio.  To quote its inventor, Stephen Few, a Bullet Graph “is designed to display a key measure, along with a comparative measure and qualitative ranges to instantly declare if the measure is good, bad or in some other state.”

If you want more details on Bullet Graphs or dashboard design in general then I recommend you buy his book “Information Dashboard Design”.  For this post I’m going to concentrate on how to build the shape itself…