There are several housekeeping items in today’s post. New resource Chris Roth, a Visio MVP, has begun a new Visio blog: http://www.wanderkind.com/visio/ Check out articles on creating flowcharts from code and hiding parts of shapes. Recruiting Visio & CAD users Do you use Visio to view, draw on top of, convert or export CAD drawings? …
Year: 2006
Better Layout Using Dynamic Glue
Visio makes it easy for users to place shapes anywhere and provides connectors for maintaining connections between shapes. However, as diagrams get more complicated, users often look to Visio for help organizing shape placement and connector routing on the page. Unfortunately, while Visio’s automatic layout functionality is quite powerful, many times the results are not good…
How Far Can I Zoom In?
Here’s a recent question on the newsgroups that has come up several times in the past. It seems that the larger you make a page in Visio, the less you can zoom in to see the details. This is true. There is a maximum zoom limit in Visio, and this maximum depends on the size…
Printing Comments
Visio 2003 introduced a new Reviewer & Markup feature that allows users to add comments to diagrams. A typical question we are asked is “How do I print the comments?” This capability was not included in the markup feature, but our Product Support team has published a solution in a Knowledge Base article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/898514/en-us …
Seeing While You Drag
There have been several recent newsgroup questions relating to dragging shapes around on the page. Sometimes you get to see the geometry you are dragging around. Other times you only see an outline rectangle. A similar issue is that dragging is quite choppy such that you often don’t see what you drag. Both issues deal…
Joining the Club
In an earlier post we talked about Visio being a general purpose diagramming and drawing application that enabled specialized behavior through its extensibility model. Custom shapes are combined with custom code to create an intelligent diagramming solution for a particular scenario. Sometimes users like to take this extensibility notion even further by creating their own…
What’s in Your Drawing?
This post will be a little experiment to try out file attachments on the blog. When customers send files to us, we often want to get a general understanding about the drawing contents. This is common in scenarios where customers are concerned about performance or file size. Visio drawings may be carrying some excess baggage…
No More Template Help
A common newsgroup question is how to prevent the Template Help task pane from appearing every time a document is opened. Not only do we see lots of newsgroup posts about this, it turns out that one of the more common pieces of feedback we receive through Rate this Template is “Let me disable this…
Running with Characters, part 2
In the previous post we looked at the Characters object in Visio and used it to find the runs of formatted text in a shape. In this post we’ll complete the scenario by reading the formatting information from the Shapesheet to match it up with the text runs. Here is our sample shape text with…
Running with Characters
When working with shape text through automation, the Text property of a Shape is generally sufficient to get and set the text. However, this simple property ignores the fact that Visio text may have rich formatting applied or that the text is composed of text fields. If you need a more industrial-strength way to retrieve…