I’m back after a week out with a cold that has now visited each family member. Thanks to blog commenters for their well wishes, that was nice of you all! I wanted to talk about a handy way to store and re-use your favorite shapes in Visio. Most of the time, I find that…
Applying Formatting to Multiple Visio Shapes At One Time
I’ve got a nasty cold right now. That first few weeks after school starts is one big sick-fest with kids happily swapping bugs and then bringing them home. So this will be a short blog. I promise to spend more time on developer topics next week, I know I’ve been neglecting you. In…
Troubleshooting Jagged Lines in Visio Flowcharts
As one user posted in blog feedback, it can be utterly aggravating when your flowchart acquires jagged lines. It’s remarkably easy to get into this state. I don’t know about you, but I end up with jagged lines when I start to resize shapes while maintaining connections. Let’s say that I’m using the Basic Flowcharts…
Fast Visio Flowcharts
Here’s what I do if I want to create a simple but good-lookin’ Visio flowchart FAST. I’ve marked formatting steps as [OPTIONAL] since they aren’t required to put together the flowchart itself. 1) Finding the stencil: Open the Business Process | Basic Flowchart Shapes stencil 2) Finding the shape: Drag the shape that is called…
Visio SP 1 Administrator Install Questions
I heard in email from a blog user asking: 1) How best to determine what SP is installed? 2) How to determine the path to where the app is installed (is there a reg key separate from the office key)? Sounded like a pretty common question that IT admins might have so I wanted…
Visual Effects — Soft Shadows on Rectangles and Circles
I have a Program Manager on my team named Matt who is a whiz at extracting cool effects from existing Visio functionality. One of the things that he’s discovered is the ability to combine Visio’s gradient support and shadow support to create a soft shadow for squares, rectangles, and circles. Soft shadows give a professional…
Dev Luv: Visio and .NET Development
Visio, like the other apps in Office, is a COM application. Ergo, it has COM interfaces and needs a Primary Interop Assembly (PIA) to work with .NET applications. A pretty decent percentage of our current dev community uses .NET to build custom Visio apps. I’ve got a two-year old son who takes soccer for…
Sample Images of a Visio Soft Fade Shape Applied
In an earlier blog, I talked about how to create a soft fade shape that adds a subtle yet very neat effect to a drawing. Using the soft shade I created, here’s how it affects different types of drawings. I think it works best with timelines, but you can try it on other drawings types…
Sample Images of Visio Color Schemes for Drawings
I just got my file download site set up so that I can post images of stuff that I talk about. Color schemes, as I was blogging earlier, are the easiest way to improve the appearance of your drawing. Color schemes are not treated equally in all drawing types. For example, they don’t even appear…
How do you use Visio?
I’d love to hear about the context in which you use drawings — whether you’re an end user of the app or a developer of custom solutions for the app. Want to post feedback and talk about how you use Visio? Me, I use Visio a lot. Here’s some things that I do with Visio as…