Visio 12 - Eric Rockey

Do you ever put Visio diagrams on a SharePoint site, Web site, or file server so you can easily share them with others? Are you making use of Visio 2007’s Data Link and Data Graphics features? If so, the Visio Product Planning department would like to talk to you! We are currently conducting research to understand how our customers would like to share diagrams inside their organizations.

If you think you can help us with this area (and would like to help chart Visio’s future), simply contact us.

Hey!

Do you ever open, save or use AutoCAD files (DXF/DWG) with Visio? If so, the Visio product team would like to talk to you. Please drop us a line, and we’ll be in touch.

We keep on hearing requests for more details on how to create your own data graphics.  Bill Morein's post gave you the basics, and now Mark Nelson on the Visio PM team has written a much more detailed article on this topic (and data graphics in general) and posted it up on MSDN:  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa468596.aspx . This should give you everything you need to roll your own text, icon set or data bar callouts.  Looking forward to seeing some of the new ones that folks come up with!

Tim Davenport, a Visio Program Manager on my team, has written an MSDN article that gives a ton of great information about our new themes feature and in particular, how to design Visio shapes that work well with themes.  Check it out here:  http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa445858.aspx 

Hi all,

We're currently recruiting for the Visio Customer Council, which is a great way to have an early impact on the next version of the product.  Please read below to see if you are interested.  For all of you RSS aggregators, forgive the spam if you're getting this on the other Visio blogs too - we wanted to make sure that everyone who's interested in Visio saw it.

One of the things we keep hearing from customers is a desire to make their own Data Graphics instead of using the ones we provide with Visio 2007.  This is completely possible -- we designed Data Graphics to be extensible.   Bill Morein, a fellow Visio blogger on my team, has posted some initial information on how to do this at http://blogs.msdn.com/wmorein/ .  We're working on complete documentation for how to do this and will publish that in the future.  But this should get you started for now if you are interested (plus Bill's got a lot of other good stuff to read about Visio).

There’s been a lot going on this week that I wanted to let you know about. 

First of all, of course, Office 2007 Beta 2 (including Visio) has been released and is publicly available, which means that everyone can download and try out this huge release.  Beta 2 looks good across the board and Visio in particular is ready to have its tires kicked.  Check it out:  http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx

We’ve also released a Beta 2 version of the Visio 2007 SDK.  This includes new wizards for working with Visual Studio 2005, and new code samples that show you how to program against our new data features.  You can download the SDK here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=373D34B8-5EF7-4E6E-A582-C8D6B5EE4E33&displaylang=en

Next, the Visual Studio team has made available a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Visual Studio Tools for Office “v3”, which adds support for Visio for the first time.  This is exciting news for Visio add-in developers.  Go here to download it:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=68978824-CA55-4208-A55E-5C4858183B31&displaylang=en#Overview   (One note is that you need to follow a specific installation order:  Visual Studio 2005, Office Beta 2, and then VSTO.  This is described in the instructions at the bottom of the download page.)

Finally, I’m very excited to announce that we have launched a Visio team blog called “Visio Insights”.  This blog is aimed to help you get the most out of Visio and help everyone see what’s possible with our product.  The topics will cover everything from end user functionality through developer features, and isn’t necessarily tied to Visio 2007 – we’ll be covering the breadth of what Visio can do, including features that were around in Visio 1.0:   http://blogs.msdn.com/visio/  .  The first post of Visio Insights also includes a good list of all of the other people out there blogging on Visio.

I’ll still be talking about Visio 2007 features here, but I encourage you to give Visio Insights a read as well.

Hi, I’m back again from another round of traveling (thanks for the messages from people wondering where I was!) and I’ve still got more new features to tell you about in Visio 2007.  This week I’m going to spend some time talking about the new Themes feature and some of the other improvements to how diagrams are formatting that we’ve been working on.

One of the things that really struck me when we went out talking to customers during the planning phase of Visio 2007 was how many Visio diagrams are being used in presentations, and how the graphical quality of Visio diagrams was becoming increasingly important.   Visio diagrams used to be more technically focused, and the formatting took a distant second place to the content.  This is changing.   Frequently the diagrams were being used to propose a new business system to upper management, whether it was an improved business process, an addition to the IT network infrastructure, or a new organization structure.  In  these situations, having the diagram look sharp and professional becomes crucial to being able to sell the idea.   The content is still the most important aspect, but being easy on the eye isn't just fluff anymore.

Hey, what's up?  I'm back from a little break after the Visio Partner Conference.  Today I'm going to talk about the last of the major data features we are doing in Visio 12:  PivotDiagrams.  You can think of PivotDiagrams as similar to PivotTables in Excel.  They allow you to work with data where you want to see groups and subtotals.  The difference, of course, is that a PivotDiagram does this visually as a diagram:

They are great when you need to communicate the key pieces of information in your data to other people in a very visual way.  It's also easy to drill into your data with PivotDiagrams and find exactly the right parts of data that you want to present.  PivotDiagrams can take advantage of all of the power of Data Graphics that I've been showing you in previous posts, so you can create some graphically rich ways to show your data.

So how do PivotDiagrams work?  They are a new diagram type in Visio 12, so to use one you simply select the PivotDiagram template in the startup screen.  This triggers the Data Selector wizard that lets you choose which data source you want to connect to (PivotDiagrams are always connected to external data).  PivotDiagrams can connect to Excel, Access, SQL Server, SQL Server Analysis Services, SharePoint lists, and other OLE/DB or ODBC data sources.When you select your data source, you end up with a single shape in your PivotDiagram that shows you the sum total of all of the rows in your data.  Here we are looking at data showing the performance of different call center locations for a corporation:

By default we pick a total for you to get you started, but you can easily change which totals are displayed over in the PivotDiagram task pane. 

Simply check different totals and they will appear in the diagram (similar to PivotTables). In this case, we are adding totals for the Solve Rate of customer calls:

Once you have the totals that you want to display, the next step is to choose how you want to break out your data into groups and subtotals.  To do this you use the "Add Category" control in the task pane. Simply click on one of the categories to break out the currently selected shape.  In this example, I'm breaking out the totals by the different types of calls:  Hardware, Software, etc:

You can keep on breaking out the subtotals as well.  So I could select the "Software" shape, and break these totals out by the different priorities of the calls:

So you can see how it's easy with PivotDiagrams to drill into your data and find the key pieces that you want to communicate.  You can also re-pivot the data by a different category.  You can select the root shape, and choose a different category to drill on.  This will remove all of the other shapes and drill in on the new category (in this case the call center locations).

Now this is showing comparative data for the different call center locations around the U.S. We can go in and add some Data Graphics to show the data in richer, more visual ways.  In this case, the Customer Satisfaction with the different call centers can be visualized as a speedometer data bar, and we can also show a trend arrow indicating if customer sat is going up or down:

We could leave the PivotDiagram like this -- it's already showing us some important information in a visual, easy-to-understand way.  But since this information is geographically related, it might be even easier to understand if we placed it on a map.  This brings us to another important point about PivotDiagrams:  you can easily customize the layout to better communicate the data.  While they start out looking like a tree diagram, similar to an organizational chart, this is just a starting point for you to customize to suit your needs.  In this case, you can simply select and delete the connectors between the shapes, drag out a U.S. map shape to the page, and place the different PivotDiagram shapes in their appropriate locations around the map:

Once you end up with a graphic that you are happy with, you can save it and refresh it on a regular basis as data changes.  This is an easy way to create a graphical report that can be distributed to everyone on your team to keep people updated on current status.  In future posts, I'll show you some of the pre-defined PivotDiagram reports that we are shipping as part of Office 2007.

Wow, what a couple of days it's been at the Visio Partner Conference!  The level of excitement has been fantastic, and the new data features have been received very well.  Steve Ballmer started things off with the typical Ballmer enthusiasm Thursday morning with a joint Visio and Project Keynote.  He featured a great demo from a partner called INS that is working on a Sarbanes-Oxley compliance solution.  It deeply integrated Visio 12 and SharePoint and took advantage of our new data capabilities.  Compliance is a huge amount of work for corporations today, and a big part of this requires visualizing all of the processes in the company in order to guarantee that they are appropriately managed.  Visio plays a major role here, and solutions such as the INS one that handle end-to-end management of the compliance work are a logical next step.

I presented an overview of all of the features we are doing in Visio 12 as well as a deep dive into the Data Link and Data Graphics features.  So many partners have come up and talked to me afterwards about how they can't wait to take advantage of these new features -- it's really going to make a lot of their scenarios so much easier to do.  The amount of response has really floored me.  We spent the rest of Thursday giving more details of Visio 12, and on Friday, a series of presentations on developer issues and partner solutions.  My boss, Richard Wolf, gave a keynote Friday, focusing on the partner opportunity in three top growth areas:  IT, Business Process Excellence (which includes compliance) and Information Reporting and Analysis. 

I think the overriding theme at the conference is "Visio is back".  Any lingering doubts people may have had about Microsoft's commitment to Visio have disappeared as everyone saw how much work we have been putting into this next release and the level of enthusiasm that is on display here.  I saw tons of cool solutions built on Visio in all different areas:  information reporting diagrams showing sales statistics overlaid on top of retail store layouts, partners who have been working with Beta 1 and can already auto generate data connected network diagrams from MOM and SMS data, even entire sugar processing plants visualized in Visio!  And too many others to name here.  To everyone who attended and those who presented -- thanks for making this such a big success!

It's been a busy week for us here on the Visio team.  We're getting ready to host the first Visio Partner Conference in over 4 years this coming Thursday and Friday in Seattle.  We have over 230 partners and other Visio fans (sold out!) coming to get an in-depth look at what's new in Visio 12. 

As you can imagine, we're really excited to be able to show what Visio 12 can do, and also to get feedback from everyone on what they think.  I'll be updating my blog with news and announcements from the conference as they occur.  We'll be showing all of the features I've been discussing so far (plus a few others I'll be telling you about soon).

I thought I'd start off the New Year with a little break from the data features in Visio 12, and talk about one of the other areas we've been working on in the product as well.  We are spending a lot of time on data, but are doing plenty of other features too!  One of the things I hear from customers is that, while Visio allows them to draw things that they wouldn't have been able to create before, it's still a bit more complicated to use than it needs to be.  Even something as basic as how you construct a diagram in Visio has quite a few steps.  For example, let's look at how you would draw this flowchart in Visio:

To create this flowchart, you have to follow the same set of steps that you do with many of the different drawing types in Visio.  You need to add the shapes to the diagram, arrange the shapes so that they are aligned and spaced correctly, and then you need to connect the different shapes together.  Today in Visio, these are all three different operations.  You drag and drop the shapes to add them to the diagram, then you would either eyeball the alignment or use any of the many alignment tools in Visio (such as "Align Shapes" in the Shapes menu).  Finally you would switch to the connector tool and add the connectors.  Quite a bit of work to get a basic diagram created, and the number of steps can be confusing for people starting out in Visio. The connector tool in particular is something that takes a while to figure out.  Some people don't use it and end up just drawing lines instead of connectors between shapes.  This looks fine until you decide to move shapes around, and then the lines don't follow the shapes!

In Visio 12, we took a look at the process of constructing a diagram and tried to figure out how it could be simplified.  How can you create shapes, line them up, and connect them all at once?  This resulted in a new feature we are calling AutoConnect.  It's really a new way to draw in Visio and one of the things I'm most excited about in our new version.

How does AutoConnect work?  When you are creating a drawing, you drag the first shape out like normal.  But when you drag the second shape out, you can drop it on one of the blue arrows that appears when you hover over the first shape:

Dropping the second shape on one of these arrows does the following:  it adds the shape to the diagram, aligns and spaces it correctly, and connects it to the first shape.  In one action you have accomplished the three steps needed to successfully add a shape to the diagram!  This already makes things faster, but we also built a few other variations into AutoConnect to speed things up even more.  First, once you have a shape selected in your shapes window, instead of dragging and dropping you can just click on the blue arrows to add a shape to the page:

Finally, imagine that you already have two shapes that are already on the page next to each other and want to connect them.  Even if you used AutoConnect to add the shapes originally, you might have a loop in your process that requires you to add an additional connector to the page.  If two shapes are next to each other, when you click on one of the blue AutoConnect arrows, we will connect them together:

Using AutoConnect can simplify the process of creating diagrams in Visio. Think of it as another tool in your arsenal for creating diagrams (though I find I tend to use it almost all of the time now).  You can still use any other technique that worked for you before, either alone or in conjunction with AutoConnect.  We're not doing anything to force you into using this model.  Another thing I wanted to point out was that it's not just for flowcharts.  Almost any type of diagram that involves connected shapes in Visio can be created using AutoConnect.  For example, you could create a network diagram using the same technique.

We've worked on a number of features including AutoConnect that make the basics of creating and formatting diagrams faster and easier with Visio 12.  I'll talk about a few more of them in later posts (as well as getting back to some more cool data features).

Welcome back!  Hope everyone out there had a great holiday season.  For those of you who tried to submit a comment and couldn't, yes, I really DO want to hear from you!  Evidently there was a setting that didn't allow comments to be posted, which I just changed.  So submit away!

Last week I talked about connecting a Visio diagram to data, but we hadn't gone over how to actually display the data on the diagram itself.  That's where data graphics comes in.  Data graphics is a new technology we are introducing in Visio 12 that provides a variety of ways of showing data on top of shapes.  It's really the key to all of the different things we are doing with data in Visio 12.  Let's look at a few quick examples of shapes with data graphics applied to them:

Data graphics can be as simple as those next to the computer shape on the left, which are just 3 text fields and their labels, or they can include more graphical elements, such as the bars in the middle example or the stoplight icons on the rightmost shape.  Here's the list of different types of data graphics items that will be available with Visio 12.  I'm only showing a couple examples of each -- Visio will come with more (and you can of course create your own as well):

Text         A variety of different ways to show text on or around a shape.

Data Bars    Databound widgets that change size according to data.

Icon Sets    Different icons that show or hide on a shape based on data.

Color by Value    Change the color of the Visio shape based on data.

Data graphics consist of a combination of these different items, connected to specific fields of data and laid out around a Visio shape in a specific way.  Once a data graphic is applied to a shape, it acts like part of the shape.  The data graphic will move with the shape, be copied with the shape, and be deleted with the shape.

So how do you use data graphics?  First you need to have some shapes in your diagram with data behind them. This can be simply shape data that you typed in for a shape, or it could be data that was imported using the Data Link feature.  The good news is that if you are using Data Link, we'll automatically create and apply a simple data graphic to the shapes when you connect them to data.  If you want to edit the data graphic, or apply your own combination of data graphic items to a shape, you use the Data Graphics task pane:

This is the central place to go to in order to see all of the different data graphics that are applied in your diagram, apply them to other shapes, or create and edit them.  To apply a data graphic to a shape, simply select the shape and click on one of the data graphic previews in the task pane.  If you want to edit a data graphic, right click on it and choose edit.  This opens the Edit Data Graphic dialog:

This dialog is where you can customize your data graphics or build up a new one from scratch using the different types of data graphic items (text, data bars, icon sets, color by value).  If you want to add an element, simple click on the "New item" button.  This shows a dropdown allowing you to choose one of the different types:

When you add an item, you get a detailed settings dialog that allows you to specify things such as the data field the item is bound to and its label.  You can also control the item's position here as well. By default, Visio will automatically group all of the data graphics together into a single location around the shape, but if you choose, you could move each different data graphic item to a different position around the shape.

One thing you need to consider is where to place the data graphic.  Is it going to go inside of the actual shape, or outside (usually to the right or underneath)?  If it goes inside, it may compete with the text that you have typed into the shape (in the workflow diagram from last week, that text contained the names of the steps in the workflow).  To overcome this, Visio allows you to turn off the shape's text box when using a data graphic if desired.  This is particularly useful if that same information is also contained in a data field and can just become part of the data graphic. 

So now let's return to the workflow shapes and see what it would take to create their data graphics. All of the editing actions you need to take to accomplish this are in the Edit Data Graphics dialog.  Here's what the shape looked like to start with:

First, we need to turn the shape text off, and add a text data graphic item at the top of the shape that is linked to the name field of the data:

Next a couple more text items are added, linked to the status field and the number of the step in the workflow process:

And a data bar is added to visually show the average time in days that each step in the process takes:

We also want to call out when a step is taking too long to complete.  So we will also show an icon when the average time is above a certain threshold (in this case, if takes longer than 10 days, we'll show a red icon, and if it's between 5 and 10 days we'll show a yellow icon).

Finally, I added some additional formatting with our new themes feature (more on that in future posts) to arrive at the final result:

Now that this data graphic is applied to the shape, when the underlying data about the workflow process changes, the diagram can be updated and the graphics will automatically adjust to show the changes.  This allows you to use the diagram as a visual report for the workflow data.

I hope this has given you some ideas about how you could use Data Link and Data Graphics in diagrams that you work with.  Feel free to drop me a line if you come up with any -- I'd love to hear about them.  I'm taking a break for the holidays after this post -- I'll see you next year!

Okay, let's dig into some of the scenarios around integrating data with Visio diagrams that I mentioned last week.  One of the major trends right now in the enterprise is the focus on process improvement.  Companies can realize huge gains in quality and profitability by visualizing their business processes, analysing them for inefficiencies, and targeting improvements to the crucial steps in the process.  This is an area where Visio really shines.  We've added some additional templates in Visio 12 that will make this process easier (more on that later), but even the flowchart and cross-functional flowchart diagrams that we have today make it pretty easy to depict a business process and look at improving it.  Consider this example of a customer engagement workflow:

This shows the steps taken to process a customer request for engagement, and the different members of the team involved.  Visualizing this workflow helps to give you the big picture and understand each step in the process.  But if you are looking to improve this process, it would be handy to be able to show some information about each step as well in the diagram.  For instance, the duration of each step is an interesting measure of where a workflow is bogging down, and we can also add some additional info on the current status of each step. We could even highlight the steps that were particularly slow.  And it would be much easier if this data was contained in an external data source so that it would be easily created and updated. So a finished diagram could look like this:

But how would you create this?  In current versions of Visio, this would be tough.  In addition to the problems of getting the data into the diagram that I talked about last week, you'd need to be a Visio expert to actually display the data on your shapes like that.  You would need to do a lot of customization to the existing Visio shapes, inserting multiple "fields" for different pieces of data, and creating your own custom widget to show you the average duration time.  All this is not that easy, trust me.  In Visio 12, though, you can create this diagram pretty quickly, following a few simple steps.  The three steps you need to take are:

1) Connect to a data source
2) Link rows in the data source to shapes in the Visio diagram
3) Display the fields of data on top of the shapes using Data Graphics

The feature that allows us to perform the first two steps in Visio 12 is called "Data Link".  This is a visual way to connect to data sources and link rows to shapes.  To use Data Link, you can simply choose "Link shapes to data" from our new "Data" menu in Visio 12.  This brings up a wizard that lets you choose your data source.   You can connect to Excel, Access, SQL Server, SharePoint lists, and other OLEDB ODBC data sources.  Once you have completed this wizard, you get an "External Data Window" at the bottom of your diagram:

At this point, data is imported into the Visio diagram, but it's still not associated with any of the shapes in the diagram yet.  You can link rows of data to shapes in a couple of ways.  The easiest is just to drag a row out and drop it on top of a shape on the page.  When you do this, you are populating what we call the shape data (we used to call these custom properties in previous versions).   If there are many shapes in the diagram, they can all be linked up to rows of data at the same time by using a feature called the Automatic Link Wizard.  This wizard allows you to match rows of data up to shapes on the page according to a condition.  For example, you could match the text in a shape up to a specific column in your data:

Once a row of data has been linked to a shape, you will probably want to view at least some of this data directly on the shape.  That's where the Data Graphics feature comes in.  Data Graphics is the technology in Visio 12 that allows us to display data in a variety of different ways on top of a Visio shape.  

So up to now we've talked about connecting to a data source, importing data, and linking data to a shape.  Next time I'll discuss how to use Data Graphics and what types of visualizations they offer.  One thing to bear in mind:  I've been using a flowchart diagram as an example, but Data Link works equally well with any diagram type in Visio.