Bill Morein's Weblog

In the first PivotDiagram tips post , I talked about some of the alternate ways to create a new PivotDiagram. In this post, I’ll cover an alternate way to filter your data. Filtering by Using “Promote” After creating your diagram and hooking...

If you didn't get a chance to make it to the Visio Conference we held in January, we've put up audio/visual recordings from all of the sessions at http://www.visioconferencecontent.com/ . There is a lot of great information there, whether you are interested...

Over the last several years, we have seen Lean become more and more prominent as a process improvement methodology. Although it has roots in manufacturing, it is starting to migrate to other industries like healthcare. One of the key parts of the Lean...

I've started focusing more and more on the new features in Visio 2007 and will definitely continue to do so. For those of you who are interested but aren't quite ready to commit a machine to beta software just yet, there is a new option out there. The...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Along with the rest of the 2007 Office system, Visio 2007 Beta 2 is now available for public download at the download preview site . All you need to be able to install the application is a Windows Live ID/Passport account, which you can set up when you...

A longstanding request from Visio developers has been support in Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). I’m happy to say that for those of you in the Office Beta 1 program, you can start playing around with this now. For details on setting it up, check...

I'll be presenting a session at TechEd in Boston on programming the new Visio 2007 data features. Here are the session details: Microsoft Office Visio 2007: Building Data Visualization Solutions Day/Time: Thursday, June 15 8:00 AM - 9:15 AM Room...

For this post, I'll walk through the process of building up a shape from scratch and editing it using the ShapeSheet. The shape itself won't be too complex, but we'll cover a few of the interesting features of the ShapeSheet. To get started, create...

The ShapeSheet is probably the most overlooked part of Visio. The amount of power that you can get by using the ShapeSheet without any programming is pretty amazing. The basic idea is that behind every shape in Visio there is a spreadsheet that defines...

Customers and partners are starting to arrive in Seattle for the sold out Visio Conference , starting tomorrow. We're very excited to roll out Visio "12" in detail publicly for the first time. We think that you'll love what we have done with the product...

In the post yesterday , I started to cover some analytic ways to think about building up data intensive diagrams. In future posts, I'll spend a little more time talking about how to use those tools for specific diagram types. Of course, another great...

When you are looking to persuade or enlighten, you need to be able to do a great job of presenting information in a way that your audience will understand. As we worked on Visio “12” one of our main goals was to make it incredibly easy to create great...

The first version of the Resource Kit for IT Professionals was a huge hit with customers, so a few months back an updated version was created. The new kit still includes the Altima shapes that were in the first version, but adds LANSurveyor from Neon...

A new tool (including source code) has been posted on GotDotNet: the Visio Connector for Project/EPM/SPS . This is useful by itself but also provides a great way to learn about connecting Visio with some of the most popular data sources out there. It...

Eric Rockey, the Lead Program Manager for Visio, has started a blog that will cover the new features in the next version of Visio. This is a huge release for us, so make sure to check out the great stuff he is covering.