Automatic Page Sizing in Visio 2010

When you start a new diagram, you typically begin with a single drawing page that is the size of a standard piece of printer paper.  Many diagrams grow beyond the size of a single printed sheet.  Visio 2010 adds a dynamic page sizing capability that responds as you draw, so you no longer have to…


Inserting and Deleting Shapes in Visio 2010

Diagram maintenance is a task that everyone performs, and many users spend much of their time in Visio maintaining existing diagrams.  We realize that a fair amount of the time you spend maintaining your diagrams is spent in the mechanics of the task, rather than achieving the goals of updating the concept the diagram represents. …


The Visio 2010 Connectivity API

Our previous post on AutoConnect in Visio 2010 discussed how Visio 2010 makes it simpler and faster for end users to create connected diagrams such as flowcharts. Many developers will be pleased to hear that Visio 2010 also brings greatly simplified utilities for working with connected diagrams programmatically. The Visio 2010 API contains new methods…


AutoConnect in Visio 2010

AutoConnect was a feature first introduced in Visio 2007. The original intent of the feature was to simplify the creation of connected diagrams such as business process flowcharts by accomplishing multiple tasks in a single action: 1. Dropping a new shape on the page. 2. Connecting the new shape to the original shape. 3. Aligning…


Applying a Background or Border Design in Visio 2010

Visio 2010 introduces a new way to apply a background or border and title design to your diagrams. The new Backgrounds and Borders & Titles galleries on the Design tab in the ribbon let you choose from a variety of styles and apply them with one click. Backgrounds For several versions, Visio has provided a…


Themes and Live Preview in Visio 2010

In Visio 2007, we introduced the Themes feature to make it easy to apply a professionally designed look to a diagram. In Visio 2010, the Themes feature gets a whole new user interface that takes advantage of the Office Fluent UI. The theme choices are displayed in a gallery on the Design tab in the…


SharePoint Conference 2009

The Visio team is anxiously preparing to introduce Visio Services to the world at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009, which runs from October 19th to 22nd, 2009 in Las Vegas. Visio Services is a new SharePoint feature that allows you to share Visio drawings across your organization in SharePoint. But it does more… If you’re…


Introducing Mr. Clarity

Harry Miller and Jonathan Foster in Office Content Publishing recently created a new educational video series called “Clarity,” whose aim is to encourage people to learn more about how to use Visio. (Note that these videos feature Visio 2007, rather than the newer Visio 2010 Community Tech Preview we have been discussing on the blog…


Creating custom validation rules for Visio 2010

In our last post, we discussed Diagram Validation—a new Visio 2010 feature which allows users to check their diagrams for common errors and allows companies to ensure that employees are following certain diagramming standards. In this post, we’ll talk more about how validation rules are stored and how to create custom validation rules. With Visio…


Diagram Validation in Visio 2010

Are all the shapes in my diagram labeled? Do I have any loose connectors that are not attached to other shapes? We have heard from customers that it is often hard to answer these types of questions, especially in large diagrams. As a result, they spend a lot of time manually checking diagrams for errors….