Visio 2003 Service Pack 3

Microsoft has released Service Pack 3 for the Visio 2003 product.  You can download the pack here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E6B77D9A-0749-41CE-BD1A-9BF73718593C&displaylang=en (If English is not your install language, you can change to another one on the web page.)   Contents The set of changes is described here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938794/  The majority of the changes in this release are security…


Publishing Visio 2007 Solutions

Saul Candib, our technical writer for Visio, has posted an excellent article on MSDN explaining how to publish Visio 2007 solutions.  In this context “solutions” refers to the add-ons, templates, stencils and/or help files that you have created and want to distribute to other people. We covered this topic in a previous post, but the MSDN…


Automatic Behaviors in Visio

Several people have posted in the newsgroups about Visio moving shapes around unexpectedly – particularly when documents are opened or saved.  This random behavior can be infuriating to users.  Perhaps more frustrating is that Visio may continue moving shapes around after the user has “fixed up” their diagram again.  This post looks at automatic behaviors…


Data Graphics Tips

  One final post about Data Graphics before turning to other topics for a while.  We’ve gotten some great feedback from customers about their usage of Data Graphics.  Based on comments and observations of users, there are a few points of confusion that people are encountering.  This post explains the most common issues with the…


Make Your Own Data Graphic – Icon Sets

This is the third and final post in a series demonstrating how you can create data graphic callout shapes for use in Visio 2007 Professional.  The first post discussed Text Callouts.  Data Bars were described in the second post.  There is also an article on MSDN that covers the full spectrum of customization possibilities for…


Make Your Own Data Graphic – Data Bars

This is the second post in a series demonstrating how you can create data graphic callout shapes for use in Visio 2007 Professional.  The first post discussed Text Callouts.  There is also an article on MSDN that covers the full spectrum of customization possibilities for Data Graphics.       A Data Bar is one…


Make Your Own Data Graphic – Text Callouts

  Data Graphics is a great new feature in Visio 2007 Professional for displaying data on your shapes.  One key to the feature’s popularity is that you can make or customize your own data graphic callout shapes. There is an article posted on MSDN that covers the full spectrum of customizations possible for Data Graphics. …


New resources for Visio

Our MVP community has been quite busy creating new resouces for Visio.  We’d like to highlight a few recent releases here.     In response to a newsgroup discussion on Visio’s Network Rack shapes. Chris Roth (Visio MVP and former employee) has released a new shape for displaying rack unit dimensions.   http://www.visguy.com/2007/04/01/rack-unit-dimension-line/    …


Creating Visio Add-ins with VSTO 2005 SE

There have been several newsgroup postings about using VSTO to create Visio Add-ins.  The deployment of these add-ins can be especially challenging.  There is a new developer article by Chris Castillo detailing how to write VSTO add-ins for Visio.  Chris explains why using VSTO is desirable and aggregates information from a number of sources to walk you through…


Where’s my text control handle?

A Visio user posted a question in the newsgroups about the yellow text control handle on connector shapes.  Some connectors have a yellow handle and some don’t.  What’s going on? Starting in Visio 2003, the built-in connector shape used by the Connector Tool was modified to include a text control handle.  If you start a blank…