Visio Guy 
Posted by Visio Guy on June 28th, 2008 - 263 views
1980 witnessed the launch of the classic arcade game Battlezone by Atari.
In 2007, Microsoft launched Visio 2007, which included the new Themes feature.
For 28 years, the two have been on a collision course with destiny...linked by computers, the Geek Factor...and Fate.
Posted in Drawings & Templates, Power User | 2 Comments »
Posted by Visio Guy on June 27th, 2008 - 279 views
If you are an Exchange administrator, you might have worked with Exchange Management tools. And while you might enjoy the power and flexibility of these tools, you might be missing the ability to get a graphical overview of user mailbox details.
Now, I'm not an Exchange administrator, but I get the feeling that this thing is probably pretty cool for those of you who are...
Posted in Add-ins & Tools, Network | No Comments »
Posted by Visio Guy on June 25th, 2008 - 560 views
Attention process engineers!
Calling all techies who work in:
- Oil refineries
- Water treatment facilities
- Any plant that produces a product in liquid form!
For years one of Japan’s top Visio experts, Junichi Yoda, has offered his 3D Isometric Piping shapes to download for free. I’ve long loved these shapes (having studied mechanical engineering myself), and have put off far showcasing them on Visio Guy for far, far too long!
Posted in CAD, Shapes | 7 Comments »
Posted by Visio Guy on June 23rd, 2008 - 256 views
VBA in Visio is great for learning, prototyping and getting repetitive tasks done quickly. One problem I run into--when I’m not careful—is bloated code resulting from the copying and pasting of too many loops. But with the CallByName function in VBA, we can streamline our code! Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Code | 1 Comment »
Posted by Visio Guy on June 21st, 2008 - 291 views
UPDATE!
Hey football/soccer fans! We've got an update to our automated smart drawing for this years European Cup soccer tournament.
Perhaps you are familiar with the first version, which can be found here: European Cup 2008 Auto-Updating Diagram
Well, that version needed a few updates, most notably, the handling of games that are resolved with penalty-kicks, or shoot-outs.
Posted in Code, Drawings & Templates, Maps & Geography, ShapeSheet, Shapes | 1 Comment »
Posted by Visio Guy on June 18th, 2008 - 304 views
Wapperdude submitted this "mike" shape to Visio Guy, for us to pass on to our readers.
According to WD, the inspiration came as follows: I saw a request for audio symbols in the Visio forum, had this dumb 1998 mike shape, sent it to school and now it's smarter.
So for you A/V folks out there in Visio Land, here's a new SmartShape for your diagramming enjoyment!
Posted in AV Equipment, Shapes | 1 Comment »
Posted by Visio Guy on June 15th, 2008 - 320 views
If you create elevation drawings for rack systems, for cabinetry, for A/V systems with TVs and video monitors, or for walls with doors and windows, you'll find yourself needing frame shapes.
And while your equipment may come in different sizes, the frames should maintain consistency when they are stretched.
For example, you may have several sizes of monitor: 19-inch, 21-inch, 48-inch, etc. Even though the picture gets bigger, the bezel around the display stays the same thickness. You get more display area, not more plastic!
A Visio SmartShape offers an elegant way to depict these objects. With a little bit of ShapeSheet programming, you can make one shape that can do the job of several!
We'll call these shapes Smart Frames. This article is the first installment in a series about creating and understanding Smart Frame shapes in Visio! So enjoy this article and stay tuned in the future!
Posted in Illustration, Shapes | No Comments »
Posted by Visio Guy on June 14th, 2008 - 416 views
You can learn a lot from bad examples.
Call it learning-from-our-mistakes, anti-patterns, or devilish fun, there's a lot to be gained by looking at how-not-to-do-it.
Those of us over 30 might remember our first introduction to BASIC programming, taught to us by our friend Jeff, in the electronics corner at the local super market. While Mom was shopping, Jeff went over to the Commodore Vic 20 demo kiosk and typed the following lines:
10 PRINT "Chris is a turkey!" 20 GOTO 10 |
Utterly useless, except for the fact that it forever singed into our memory the ideas of branching and infinite loops...
Posted in Development, ShapeSheet | 3 Comments »
Posted by Visio Guy on June 9th, 2008 - 1615 views
Visio is a natural choice for creating brackets for sports tournaments.
I have seen many elimination-tournament diagrams created in Visio over the years. In fact, just a few years ago, a very nice example was done for the 2006 World Cup. You can get it at Office Online here: 2006 World Cup Bracket.
But the trouble with […]
Posted by Visio Guy on June 6th, 2008 - 1175 views
Judging from the view-counter and download stats for our post: Free Visio People Shapes, people just love free people shapes!
Well let the love-fest continue!
We recently stumbled upon a Visio page from <Low Zorro Voice> El Visioso </Low Zorro Voice> and found a keeper that we’d like to share with you!
Posted by Visio Guy on June 1st, 2008 - 1587 views
We’ve created sixteen Visio shapes that combine individual country-outlines with corresponding national flags. Whether you are sprucing up an Euro Cup 2008 related diagram, or creating other geographically related diagrams, be sure and get these shapes!
Posted by Visio Guy on May 29th, 2008 - 1017 views
For quite some time now, I’ve wanted to create a Visio SmartShape of a proper, oval, comic-style Word Balloon shape.
But calculating the intersection of a triangular callout with the perimeter of an ellipse was too foreboding…
…UNTIL NOW!
Posted by Visio Guy on May 27th, 2008 - 2636 views
Whether you are looking to conserve energy, optimize your hardware usage, or rapidly test a wide variety of software configurations, some sort of virtualization is surely in your future.
And if you are a Visio Guy or a Visio Gal, you’ll surely want to make a diagram to better see how your network’s hardware is set […]
Posted by Visio Guy on May 26th, 2008 - 634 views
Save time creating Sankey diagrams with Visio by downloading these pre-wired arrows. Simply enter text and percentages and your arrows will resize with the process box!
Posted by Visio Guy on May 21st, 2008 - 657 views
You’ve already got your plan…but it’s only available in paper format. Not to worry, you scan it and use it in your scaled Visio drawing anyway!
Recently, we talked about techniques for using images as backgrounds for tracing vector-based Visio shapes in the article: Importing Images as Backgrounds for Tracing. What that article didn’t cover were […]
Posted by Visio Guy on May 17th, 2008 - 462 views
It’s easy enough to get the set of selected shapes in Visio using code. But if the user has sub-selected some shapes, they won’t show up in your Selection object without a bit of tweaking. Learn how to detect ALL of the selected shapes in this article!
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