We’ve put together a kit with two Visio partners, Fluke Networks and Altima Technologies, that provides an auto-discovery tool and lots of manufacturer-specific network shapes. Fluke Network’s LAN MapShot is an auto-discovery tool that crawls your network and puts together 13 different kinds of network diagrams in Visio 2003. Here’s an example of a Visio…
Christmas and Batman (in Visio)
Alexey Nichkov, a creative and expert Visio user, put together this varient on the person shape as a post on my last blog. I love it! Especially the Batman and Robin. The JPG takes a while to download so be patient — it’s up there. Alexey has other cool stuff at: http://www.prodigitall.narod.ru/ — the site is in Russian but you…
Visio “Person” Shape
If you type “person” or “user” in the Find Shape or Search for Shapes window in Visio, you get the following results. I’m not fond of the majority of these options. I think the best shape to use to represent a single user, customer, citizen, or person in general is this one: It’s…
What’s the Difference between a Cause and Effect diagram and a Workflow diagram? What’s a Brainstorming Diagram Anyway?
Visio has a depth and variety to templates that you will miss if you only use the Basic Shapes or Blocks stencils. For an overview and samples of diagram types, go to the Help menu and click on the Diagram Gallery option (in Visio 2003). This handy gallery describes all the templates in Visio,…
Visio Books and Resources
If you’re new to Visio, check out the Step-by-Step with Visio 2003 book. It provides an introduction to the product and comes with a CD with exercises. If you’re somewhat familiar with Visio but interested in getting more out of the product, the Visio 2003 Inside Out book is pretty good. It’s targeted at the…
Dev Luv: New blog on Visio solution development!
Chris Castillo, Visio’s Application Development Consultant and .NET developer extraordinaire, has started a blog on Visio solution development with a focus on .NET development: http://blogs.msdn.com/chcast. Check it out! It’s 100%-focused on developer issues for Visio. Chris knows a ton about Visio solution development and has lots of experience with standalone Visio solution as well…
Dev Luv: Storing Custom XML in Visio XML File Format
The Visio XML file format, as discussed earlier, is a physical file format with all the information that Visio needs to render the diagram with the same fidelity as the binary file format. Let’s consider the case in which a developer wants to use the data stored in shapes in a Visio business process diagram….
Getting back to blog commentors…
Just a reminder: If you post a comment to me through the blog’s Contact form, remember to put your email! I’ve gotten comments from folks who ask a question that I’d like to respond to, but the poster forgets to provide their email or gives a wrong address. I’m always happy to hear from Visio…
Summary Reporting on Shape Properties in a Visio Diagram
Visio shapes often host properties in which users add details about the shape. For example, a network server shape in Visio 2003 lets you store IP address, server location, MAC address, and other information about the server. (You can access Shape Properties for a shape by right-clicking on the shape, and selecting the Properties entry.) An…
Dev Luv: Transforming Visio’s XML File Format
As I mentioned in my last blog on the Visio XML file format, Visio documents can be saved into a native XML Visio file format (.VDX) or Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). The Visio XML file format is not a W3C standard. SVG, which is a language for describing two-dimensional graphics and graphical applications in XML,…