Bill Morein's Weblog

Somehow I had thought that I had already pointed people to Saveen Reddy's blog , but looking back through the archives I realized that I hadn't. Saveen doesn't work on the Visio team, but is a power user and knows a ton about visualization. I'm a huge...

For those more generally interested in Data Visualization, this is an interesting post: http://flowingdata.com/2008/12/19/5-best-data-visualization-projects-of-the-year/

In February this year, we held a Visio Conference at which we started to reveal some of the features in the upcoming version of Visio. There are a lot of presentations up at the main conference site, but I did two presentations that were specific to the...

We've posted the agenda for the upcoming Visio Conference . This conference will be expanded significantly from the last one, which was more focused on partners. This version will include a lot more end user content. One major note: we will be disclosing...

SharePoint has been getting a lot of attention recently, and I've seen a lot of requests for stencils to help manage its design and deployment. A former colleague pointed me to this post , which includes a stencil that allows you document site structure...

One of the most frequent questions I get from partners and other readers of this blog is how to improve the performance of their solution. Usually the first step is to point them to these five performance tips , but I thought it would be interesting to...

This has already been mentioned on some of the other Visio-related blogs, but I wanted to make sure that people are aware of the Visio Conference 2008 , taking place here in Redmond in February of next year. The last conference (held in February 2006...

It is baseball playoff time here in the US, so I wrote a Visual Studio Tools for Office 2008 beta add-in that lets you track games right inside the home tab of the Word 2007 ribbon. The add-in shows the score, inning, and base situation for games in progress...

One of the most common requests I get from IT users of Visio is for a way to draw out an Active Directory topology map. Visio has Active Directory shapes, but until now it didn't have the ability to actually go out and create a diagram from AD. We've...

Coding Horror has a good post summarizing a number of breakdowns similar to the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods that I covered in an earlier post .

A download is available on Microsoft.com containing a stencil and template for Exchange Server 2007 . If you do Exchange deployment or management this is worth grabbing. It works with Visio 2003 or 2007.

I'll be presenting a webcast on the Data Visualization features in Visio on Tuesday, August 7th. Here is a link to the details and registration information .

I posted a while back about the new Data Mining Add-ins for Visio and Excel that were created by the SQL Server team. That is one of the more popular posts on this blog, so I know a lot of people have been downloading them. If you have, please note that...

If you haven't already, make sure that you update any copies of Visio 2002 or 2003 with the security updates that we released last month. If you use Microsoft Update or Office Update (highly recommended) then you will already be updated, but if not you...

Somehow I missed the fact that Visualizing Information with Microsoft Office Visio 2007 , a new book by David Parker, has been published. I knew that the book was coming out, but somehow the actual release slipped by me. I've had a number of people ask...

I missed this last year when it came out, but this blog post (an outgrowth of this WSJ article ) provides a link to a whole series of examples of interesting visualizations on the web. They are mostly variants of treemaps, but there are some really interesting...

Sam Batterman, a BI Evangelist here at Microsoft, writes a great blog ("Samb Business Intelligence Blog") that is heavily focused on visualization of BI data. I've been meaning to mention it for a while, and he just had a flurry of interesting posts....

If you plan to be at the Microsoft BI Conference in Seattle this week, make sure to stop by my Chalk Talk on Friday at 9:45 AM in CT Theater 3. This will be a smaller, informal session with particular emphasis on connecting Visio to SQL Server Analysis...

I spent a little time today answering questions about some of the new features in Visio 2007, and noticed that I had never linked to these articles: What's New for Developers in Visio 2007 (Part 1 of 2) What's New for Developers in Visio 2007...

While working on a little project this past week I was spending a lot of time looking for information on various Visio developer topics. To speed things up, I put together a Live Search Macro that scopes down the search to to online SDK documentation...

I'll be presenting a session on Visio at Interop Las Vegas on May 22nd. The presentation will focus on visualizing IT data using Visio 2007. If you'll be at the conference, make sure to check it out. I'll be around for a few days, so if you are interested...

Some developers have noticed a change that we made in Visio 2007: more of the shapes we ship with Visio contain the GUARD ShapeSheet function. This was done to make some shapes work better with our new Themes feature and often just to take formatting...

A few people have asked me if the remote desktop hyperlink creator is Visio-specific. The answer is no. It creates hyperlinks that can be used anywhere. If you publish your network diagrams using Visio's Save as Web feature it will work there too. ...

As I've mentioned before, Visual Studio Tools for Office includes wizards for Visio in their latest release (VSTO 2005 SE) and this will be a big part of Visio development in the future. Having said that, there is still a little bit of work in creating...

One of our developers pointed me towards this great case study of a business drawing program called Mainline , which eventually was renamed to Visio. Other early names of the company and product include Axon, ShapeWare, and Graw (see http://visio.mvps...