As many of you know, Visio 2007 and the other Office applications will support exporting to Adobe PDF and Microsoft XPS (XML Paper Specification). This works out of the box in Beta 2, but will be a separate free download when the final version is released (see this post for details). To generate one of…
Year: 2006
Visio 2007: PivotDiagram tips and tricks, part 1
Eric posted a little bit about PivotDiagrams and what you can do with them. I’d like to add a little flavor to that by giving you a little more information about how to get the most out of working with the feature. Adding a PivotDiagram to an Existing Diagram Eric mentioned the new PivotDiagram template, and…
Allowing half “U” sizes in Rack Diagrams
In this post, I discussed some general tips on how to work with shapes with intelligent behaviors. Today, I’ll walk through the specific example of the Rack Diagram shapes and how to allow non-integer numbers to be entered for the “U” values (e.g. 1.5 U) in the shapes. There are two parts to this. First,…
Visio 2007: Customizing Data Graphic Items
After spending a couple days chatting with people here at TechEd, I am amazed at how many people have already downloaded and have been playing around with Visio 2007 Beta 2. If you don’t have it yet, you can check it out here. In particular, a lot of people have seen the Data Graphics feature and…
Tricks for working with the built in Visio shapes
Having shapes that work intelligently is one of the most powerful aspects of Visio. A lot of the built in templates take full advantage of that and react to changes that users make to shape data or by dragging the control handles without requiring code. Most of the time this is exactly what people want…
Visio Viewer in Outlook 2007
A big piece of news is that the Visio Viewer will be installed by default whenever Outlook 2007 is installed. This is happening as part of a new feature in Outlook – automatic preview of attachments directly in the Outlook reading pane. Visio will be one of the supported file formats and the way this…
Visio in Visual Studio Tools for Office – Public Preview Availability
I mentioned earlier the release of VSTO for Visio Beta 1 users. Now that Beta 2 is available, I’m happy to announce that anyone can try this out. To download the CTP of VSTO “v3”, go here. Note that you need to install Visual Studio first, then Visio 2007 Beta 2, and finally VSTO. The…
Bug in Creating Visio COM Add-ins with Visual Studio 2005
In this post I describe how to create Visio COM Add-ins with VS2005. It turns out that the add-ins created using the shared wizard I create have an issue such that they do not install correctly on machines that don’t have Visual Studio installed (i.e. likely all of your customers machines). There is a KB…
PIAs and Version Compatibility
With the upcoming release of Visio 2007, I’ve had a number of questions recently about the .Net Primary Interop Assemblies (PIA) and how to make a managed COM add-in that works across different versions of Visio. First, a brief history. If you have no idea what I am talking about, you can take a look…
Announcing the Visio Insights Blog
I’d like to let everyone know about the new Visio Insights blog, a joint blog written by the Visio team. The introductory post is up now and the posting schedule should be pretty regular. I’ll continue to post here but will also make some more general posts over there.