Bill Morein's Weblog : Visio 2007

(Relatively) New blog with lots of great Visio content

wmorein — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 00:51:00 GMT

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 fan of Python the programming language, and he covers a lot of information on how to use Python with Visio, among other topics. Here is a recent series he started: http://blogs.msdn.com/saveenr/archive/2009/01/22/visio-ironpython-powershell-how-to-draw-nice-diagrams-from-the-command-line.aspx

Visio Active Directory Topology Diagrammer

wmorein — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 21:24:00 GMT

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 put up a free download that does this -- the Microsoft Visio Active Directory Topology Diagrammer is now available. This runs as a separate application and is installed in the Start menu. Here is a screenshot of the UI:

Upcoming webcast

wmorein — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 03:18:00 GMT

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.

New book -- Visualizing Information with Visio 2007

wmorein — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 21:58:00 GMT

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 about good books for learning about real world uses of the new data features in Visio 2007, and I highly recommend this book for that reason.

David is one of our most active and insightful MVPs, and he has written a great book that comprehensively covers how to work with data in Visio. One of the best things about the book is that it not only covers the new features, but also has a lot of tips about how to best incorporate earlier product features into your overall solution.

Session at the Microsoft BI Conference

wmorein — Tue, 08 May 2007 06:10:00 GMT

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 Services.

Visio 2007: Good reference on developer changes

wmorein — Mon, 07 May 2007 00:01:00 GMT

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:

The first provides a good overview of the key additions around connecting to data, while the second is a complete reference of all the additions (and a small number of deprecations). It is a good idea to check the second article out if you are upgrading your application or add-in and want to see which of the new features you might want to use.

You might also want to take a look at these posts, as the document other behavior:

Visio Session at Interop Las Vegas

wmorein — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 02:44:00 GMT

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 in chatting there feel free to contact me.

VSTO and Visio

wmorein — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 00:39:00 GMT

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 a VSTO Visio add-in.

Chris Castillo has created the definitive guide on VSTO and Visio. I'd highly recommend checking it out if you do managed code programming in Visio. It explains both the how and why of working with VSTO.

Visio 2007: Consumer Launch

wmorein — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 19:36:00 GMT

I'm happy to say that you can now buy Visio 2007 online and at stores. This is a huge release for us so it is great to finally be able to have it out there broadly.

If you are looking for more information on what you get in this version, you can find my posts on Visio 2007 by using the "Visio 2007" tag. Office Online's Visio page also has a lot of good information.

Office and Visio Launch

wmorein — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 00:21:00 GMT

As many of you know, yesterday was the business launch of Office, including Visio. The full consumer launch (i.e. boxes available in stores) will happen in January. In the meantime, you can download a trial version of the final product.

We have released the latest versions of the Visio Viewer and the SDK.

Visio 2007: AutoConnect in action

wmorein — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 02:30:00 GMT

With this post I'm trying out something new: I'll be posting some videos to give you a little bit of a better flavor of some of the features in Visio.

One of the Visio 2007 features that is most compelling visually is AutoConnect. Here is the basic description of what I'm doing in the video:

Drop a server shape normally from the stencil.
Use the AutoConnect blue arrows to quickly connect up two more shapes to that server.
Drag an email server shape onto the blue arrow pointing up, connecting it up as well.
Drag out a File Server shape and drop it on the page. Then, I use the blue arrow that points at it to connect it up. This is designed to work with shapes that are already on the page.

Leaving aside the fact that the topology I built doesn't make much sense, this should give you a sense of how the feature works. Because of how I recorded it, some of the nice live dynamics that the feature has are not shown off to full effect.

If the embedded video doesn't work for you, you can grab it directly from here. If you are still having problems, let me know -- I plan to do this for a few more features in the future.

Presentation on Building Solutions using the Visio 2007 Data API

wmorein — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 04:07:00 GMT

The Office team has put up video of all of the presentations from the Office Developer Conference held this past spring. At the conference, I presented a Visio 2007 session focusing on building solutions using the new Data APIs. The direct link to the video of the session is available here. The quality of the video is high, so beware that it is a 182 MB download.

In the session we cover the three main aspects of programming against the Data APIs: Importing the data, linking the data to shapes, and displaying the data using Data Graphics. Along with the slides detailing the APIs and some possible scenarios, I build an example application (visualizing sales on a supermarket floor plan) from scratch.

Here's a high level guide to what is in the presentation:

2:00 – Demo of the end user data features
6:48 – Example scenarios and applications
11:20 – The first part of the demo, including an overview of the application and the initial creation of the data solution
22:20 – Details on the Data API
39:10 – The second part of the demo, showing more on programming Data Graphics and creating new shapes from data

We'll be publishing full documentation on the Data API soon, but this should give you a good introduction to what is possible and some tips on how to get started.

Visio 2007: PivotDiagram Tips and Tricks, part 3

wmorein — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 06:24:00 GMT

The default PivotDiagram layout is a hierarchy with spacing of 9.5 mm (or 0.375 in) between shapes. This works pretty seamlessly for a lot of data out there, but one of the powerful aspects of the PivotDiagram feature is your control over how your shapes are laid out. PivotDiagrams use the standard Visio layout feature available in all diagrams (Shape>Configure Layout…)

Tightening the Spacing Between Shapes

This is an example of the default spacing for a new PivotDiagram:

The quickest way to decrease the space between shapes is to change the page default for layout spacing. To do this, go to "Shape>Configure Layout…" and change the Spacing value (here I changed it to 4 mm). Since the breakdown shape (the one that tells you which category you added – in the above diagram it is the shape with "Animal" in it) gets in the way at these tighter spacings, you can turn it off by going to "PivotDiagram>Options…" and unchecking "Show breakdown shapes".

The PivotDiagram shapes have the title bars (the ones holding Cat, Dog, etc. in the example above) offset slightly to up and to the left. Although I think this normally looks great, that offset causes the shapes to look wider to layout and therefore has the effect of making the diagram take up additional space. If you don't need the default look, you can change the offset get back that space. To do this, go to "PivotDiagram>Edit Data Graphic…" and click on "Edit Item…" for the field "=User.visDDTitle". Change the Horizontal and Vertical Offsets to None and optionally change the Border Type to None. You'll get the diagram below:

Removing Titles and Data Legends

The default title and data legend can also be turned off if you have labeled your diagram in another way or feel that they are taking up space. The easiest way to do this is to just delete them. If you want to add them back, you can go into the PivotDiagram options dialog and check the relevant options.

Working With Page Sizes

PivotDiagrams resize the page automatically to fit the diagram onto the drawing page. If you don't like this behavior and want to resize the page yourself, you can use "Shape>Configure Layout..." and uncheck "Enlarge page to fit drawing...". Once you have the page set up correctly, you can use "Print zoom" in the "File>Page Setup..." dialog to determine how much is printed on each paper page.

These should usually get you the space you need. There are a couple more advanced tricks that I can share if there is interest. Next time I'll cover a little more about how you can deeply customize the layout.

Previous PivotDiagram tip posts:

Visio 2007: More on Customizing Data Graphics: Icon Sets with Images

wmorein — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 20:21:00 GMT

In the previous two posts on customizing Data Graphics, I covered general customization (using a text callout example) and customizing icon sets.

If you are creating icon sets, often you'll want to use existing images rather than trying to figure out how to redraw them. There are two main tips for creating icon sets with images:

You need to make the icon set item a group and then place the image in a subshape of the group.
To keep file sizes small, put all of the images in a single image strip, then use the "Foreign Image Info" section of the image master to mask out the images appropritely based on the values in msvCalloutIconNumber (these will need to refer to the parent shape).

Mark Nelson has created two examples using the Office icons and some number images:

See the attached Visio file for the example. The two masters to look at are called "Images" and "Numbers".

The full article on customizing Data Graphics will include a step by step process on doing this, and I'll link to that when it is up.

Visio 2007: More on Customizing Data Graphic Items: Icon Sets

wmorein — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 22:24:00 GMT

In my earlier post on Data Graphics customization, I covered how to edit a text Graphic Item. A few people have asked for more information on how to deal specifically with Icon Sets since that is a place where there are most often domain-specific icons to be represented. We do have some documentation coming out on that, but while we wait for it to get published I’ll give you a few pointers to help you get started.

By way of example, I’ll take a look at the “Trend arrows” Icon Set. Here is an example of the icon set in action:

There are a couple of important things to point out about this callout:

There are five possible states for this graphic item, which is the maximum number of possible states for an Icon Set.
There are only two different sets of geometry being used (the arrow and the flat line). The full set of possible states are represented by how the shape combines geometry, color, and angle.

To get started, you can follow the same steps described in the earlier post to make a copy of this master (this one will be called “Trend arrow 1” in the Drawing Explorer window) then open up your copy of the master’s ShapeSheet for editing. If you look at the “User-defined Cells” section in the ShapeSheet, you’ll see the cells that are specifically relevant to Icon Set:

User.msvCalloutType – The type of the callout (e.g. Icon Set or Data Bar). This is a string that is not localized. For this case, the value will be “Icon Set”.
User.msvCalloutIconNumber – The current icon to be displayed. Visio places the Data Graphics formulas here to determine which icon is shown (where the result ranges from 0 to IconCount – 1). The value -1 is set when no conditional statement is true. The typical action when no conditions are true should be to make the icon invisible.
User.msvCalloutIconCount – The total number of icon states that Data Graphics can show. This number must be 5 or less. (Numbers greater than 5 are treated as a 5.)

From a shape development standpoint, you use msvCalloutIconNumber to drive your shape appearance. For this shape, that means that we’ll use that value to update all geometry, angle, and fill.

First, let’s look at geometry.

There are two Geometry sections. The Geometry 1 section provides the geometry for the arrow, while Geometry 2 represents the line. If you look at the NoShow sections highlighted in red, notice that they contain IF statements driven by the value in User.msvCalloutIconNumber. For Geometry 1, it is shown unless the value is -1 (which means no condition has been triggered) or 1, which is the only one that is supposed to use Geometry 2.

To adapt this Icon Set, you can either edit the existing geometry section or add a completely new one. To add a new geometry section, right click on the ShapeSheet window and select “Add Section” then choose Geometry. Often the simplest thing is to just create one Geometry section for each possible state, but when the designer of this shape put it together he limited it to two to save space in documents.

Next, let’s take a look at how the angle is set up.

The Angle cell contains an INDEX formula that again refers back to the User.msvCalloutIconNumber cell, setting the angle of the arrow or line.

Finally, the Fill Format of the callout is changed to update the color as well.

Here, we have the FillForegnd, FillBkgnd, and FillPattern cells driven off of User.msvCalloutIconNumber cell. The foreground and background fill colors are set through a set of nested IF statements (the whole thing is protected with a GUARD to prevent accidental formatting) that specify RGB values. You can change those color values to pull from the Theme accent colors instead of specifying RGB. The fill pattern is also changed based on an INDEX formula to get the pattern matched with angle. This is necessary because we are using a gradient and reusing the geometry section – when the angle changes we need to update the gradient so it looks consistent.

Hopefully this provides enough information to get people started. Obviously the more you know about working with masters and the ShapeSheet, the easier you’ll find this. Feel free to post any questions you have and I’ll try to answer them directly or in a future post.