Mai-lan's Visio Blog

There is a 30-day trial version of Visio 2003 , if you want to check it out. Almost everything I blog about is based on Visio 2003. If you have an earlier version or have never installed Visio, you can check out the trial version of the latest and greatest...

Among other things, Program Managers at Microsoft design the user interface experience for the next generation of product. We work with our graphic designers determine the goals, color, font, and common design elements for screens, but in many groups...

Visio's “visualize information” mantra applies to many different customer scenarios. In the next several blog entries, I’m going to focus on several different uses of Visio within Microsoft. I’ll show screen shots where I can (e.g., I don’t have to scrub...

If you are shipping a custom ActiveX control in your Visio solution, it’s important to know that Visio creates a VBA project when you embed an ActiveX control in a Visio document. That means that you need to sign both the custom ActiveX control and the...

If you are developing a Visio (or any Office) managed-code COM add-in, these resources will come in handy: 1. This PIA article is the best place to start to learn more about installing and using Office 2003 PIAs. 2. If Microsoft provides an official PIA...

In the spirit of networking, can you recommend or refer anyone that you think may be qualified or have an interest in the position below? We are looking for candidates who would like to Join Microsoft's award-winning Visio Team within Office. Come join...

A blog reader recently sent me mail asking how to programmatically determine if a shape has been added to the page through a cut-and-paste operation or by the user dragging and dropping the shape from the stencil. In this case, the reader wanted to call...

Dan Brown , a blog reader, writes for Boxes and Arrows , an online magazine for information architects. His articles focus on tools and best practices for preparing information architecture deliverables. Dan has written some interesting articles on Visio...

Which option best describes how you use Visio shapes? (a) I only use the shapes that ship in the box or that I see in other peoples’ drawings; I don’t make any modification to the shapes when I use them. (b) I modify existing shapes with color or other...

Jeff, a blog reader, noticed a cool Web service shape in a .NET article posted on MSDN . Here’s what the diagram looks like. The Web services shape isn’t a Visio shape that I’ve seen before so I contacted the authors of the article here at Microsoft....