Microsoft is hosting a Visio conference from January 19-20, 2006 in Seattle. It’s downtown by the water in the Seattle Waterfront Marriott. The show is 70% sold out already, so if you’re interested, snag tickets now. Steve Ballmer is the keynote speaker. If you haven’t seen him talk live yet, it’s a lot of fun. SteveB has a way of…
Interesting Process Modeling Tool
Readers have asked me for examples of other tools that use Visio for business process analysis. One particularly nice example is IT Pearls, which has a Visio 2003 add-in called Process Modeler for Visio. It includes a set of BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) shapes, an enhanced custom properties, validation, and export to BPEL format. You…
Saving Visio Diagrams as Metafiles Within Word Documents
One of the most common questions that I get involves how to paste Visio diagrams into Word without bloating the diagram size. When you cut and paste a Visio diagram into another Office diagram, you are putting an OLE object in your document. Because you are running the Visio process within the Office document, your Office…
Japanese Visio blog
Makoto writes a great Visio blog in Japanese. He knows a ton about Visio. I don’t read Japanese but I drop by occasionally to check out the screenshots. It’s interesting to see the diagrams in the Japanese market. http://blogs.msdn.com/visioj
Visio shortcuts mousepad
Dan Brown has put together a neat little Visio accessory — a Visio reference mousepad with the keyboard shortcuts, some of which I blogged about last year, and other useful reference info. Check it out! http://www.cafepress.com/greenonions.20098068 Mai-lan
Dev Luv: Visio Drawing Control In VS 2005 Beta 2
Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 has a bug that breaks debugging for WinForm applications that host the Visio 2003 Drawing Control. The problem is caused by the new VSHost process (more information can be found here http://blogs.msdn.com/dtemp/archive/2004/08/17/215764.aspx). It is not possible to disable this hosting process in Whidbey Beta 1; however Beta 2 provides the option to turn…
BPMN stencils for Visio
Visio does not natively support BPEL or BPMN, which are both commonly used in business process management applications. BPMN stands for “Business Process Modeling Notation” and is a proposed standardization for graphical notation for enterprise processes. The BPMN working community has come up with their own Visio stencils to use to create diagrams with BPMN 1.0 shapes: …
Visio Use at Microsoft: Vaca Bubble Chart for Revenue Reporting
Visio lets people communicate business information in a variety of innovative ways. One example is in use by the Visio team for revenue reporting. The Visio product management team built a dynamic bubble chart diagram to report on Visio sales by national and international subsidiary to Visio senior management. Product management gets the latest sales…
Dev Luv: Editing Visio Masters
The shapes that you see on the stencil on the left pane of Visio are called “masters.” Think of a master as an object. When you drag a master from the stencil, you are dropping an instance of that master object onto the page. That instance, which we call a Visio shape, inherits its geometry…
Office 2003 SP1 Whitepaper (Includes Visio 2003 SP1 Details)
I’ve posted a whitepaper from the Office Supportability Group that details what is in Office SP1, which everyone should install if you are using any Office 2003 application. SP1 is available as separate downloadable patches for OneNote, MUIs, Project Client and Server, WSS, SPS and Visio. Visio’s SP1 download is located here; if you don’t…