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September 2004 - Posts

Wednesday, September 29, 2004 6:54 PM

Troubleshooting Jagged Lines in Visio Flowcharts

As one user posted in blog feedback, it can be utterly aggravating when your flowchart acquires jagged lines . It's remarkably easy to get into this state. I don't know about you, but I end up with jagged lines when I start to resize shapes while maintaining
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Tuesday, September 28, 2004 3:40 PM

Fast Visio Flowcharts

Here’s what I do if I want to create a simple but good-lookin’ Visio flowchart FAST. I’ve marked formatting steps as [OPTIONAL] since they aren’t required to put together the flowchart itself. 1) Finding the stencil: Open the Business Process | Basic
Posted by mailant | 5 Comments
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Tuesday, September 28, 2004 1:01 PM

Visio SP 1 Administrator Install Questions

I heard in email from a blog user asking: 1) How best to determine what SP is installed? 2) How to determine the path to where the app is installed (is there a reg key separate from the office key)? Sounded like a pretty common question that IT admins
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Tuesday, September 28, 2004 11:06 AM

Visual Effects -- Soft Shadows on Rectangles and Circles

I have a Program Manager on my team named Matt who is a whiz at extracting cool effects from existing Visio functionality. One of the things that he’s discovered is the ability to combine Visio’s gradient support and shadow support to create a soft shadow
Posted by mailant | 2 Comments
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Monday, September 27, 2004 6:57 PM

Dev Luv: Visio and .NET Development

Visio, like the other apps in Office, is a COM application. Ergo, it has COM interfaces and needs a Primary Interop Assembly (PIA) to work with .NET applications. A pretty decent percentage of our current dev community uses .NET to build custom Visio
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Sunday, September 26, 2004 1:24 AM

Sample Images of a Visio Soft Fade Shape Applied

In an earlier blog, I talked about how to create a soft fade shape that adds a subtle yet very neat effect to a drawing. Using the soft shade I created, here’s how it affects different types of drawings. I think it works best with timelines, but you can
Posted by mailant | 2 Comments
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Sunday, September 26, 2004 12:55 AM

Sample Images of Visio Color Schemes for Drawings

I just got my file download site set up so that I can post images of stuff that I talk about. Color schemes, as I was blogging earlier, are the easiest way to improve the appearance of your drawing. Color schemes are not treated equally in all drawing
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Friday, September 24, 2004 12:59 PM

How do you use Visio?

I'd love to hear about the context in which you use drawings -- whether you're an end user of the app or a developer of custom solutions for the app. Want to post feedback and talk about how you use Visio? Me, I use Visio a lot. Here's some things that
Posted by mailant | 2 Comments
Friday, September 24, 2004 12:14 PM

Dev Luv: Top Ten Things to Know When Using the Visio 2003 ActiveX Control

I have to say, I love the Visio ActiveX control. I think it is so cool to be able to make Visio functionality work in the context of your application user interface, rather than have your application conform to the context of the Visio user interface.
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Thursday, September 23, 2004 2:18 AM

Visio 2003 SP 1

SP1 for Visio 2003 is available for download at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=AFCA0578-E1FB-4540-B0CC-FF83DEF61CC6&displaylang=en. Install it. Among other things, it fixes printer problems that you might not know you have
Posted by mailant | 2 Comments
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Wednesday, September 22, 2004 6:39 PM

Dev Luv: Visio Development Top Five Performance Tips

Here are my favorite five recommendations for improving Visio performance in an app: Get a Cell by its location rather than its name : Retrieve a cell by its Section, Row, and Cell location in the ShapeSheet using CellsSRC, rather than by Cell name. It
Posted by mailant | 6 Comments
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Wednesday, September 22, 2004 5:21 PM

Visual Effects -- Soft Fade

If you’re willing to put a little more time into it, you can play around with transparencies and fills to create fades or bevels or soft shadows. Visio rendering is based on GDI+, which provides a rich foundation for visual effects. The easiest “advanced”
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Wednesday, September 22, 2004 5:18 PM

Welcome to the Visio blog!

Thanks for visiting! I'll be covering cool things that users can do with Visio, ranging from making it faster and easier to create a drawing to making your Visio drawing look great. I'll also be talking about Visio developer issues. I'm really interested
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Wednesday, September 22, 2004 5:18 PM

Visual Effects -- Color Schemes

Visio is a great application that gets used at about 15% capacity by most users. (It’s a testament to the functionality in Visio that the 15% still makes Visio interesting for millions of users.) I’ve seen a lot of information-packed diagrams that convey
Posted by mailant | 3 Comments
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