Visio Guy

Visio Discussions => General Visio => Topic started by: Smartkid on April 04, 2020, 02:01:15 AM

Title: Formatting Diagrams After Use of Data Visualizer
Post by: Smartkid on April 04, 2020, 02:01:15 AM
Hi everyone,

I'm a Visio rookie and new to this forum so please move this to a different subforum if I'm posting in the wrong place!

I'm currently working on a project to map the business processes across an entire organization. After this, we will be having workshops to discuss potential opportunities for optimization as well as addressing upcoming changes to underlying systems.

I have decided to use the cross-functional Data Visualizer Excel template to help populate the flowcharts for each process. What I like about it is that it is intuitive for the users and will make the iterative process a lot easier. It also helps to quickly produce a large volume of flowcharts in a short time - which is what I'm tasked with.

I tested the tool out this week and it worked great. I documented one business process - which totaled 12 flowcharts and once I had the steps noted in Excel, it took less than 20 minutes to generate all 12 flowcharts.

The challenge that I am facing is that it is extremely difficult to format these charts to our specifications after they have been generated. The formatting also appears to reset if the underlying data is refreshed. It basically took me close to 30 minutes for each flowchart to get them into the desired format.

I tried recording a macro to replicate the formatting steps that I take for each flowchart, but couldn't seem to get that to work.

Any advice or help on this would be greatly appreciated! I've tried looking for tutorials on this topic but have not really found anything.

The attached Visio drawing contains some examples. "Page 1raw" and "Page 2raw" are the flowcharts generated through Data Visualizer. "Page 1edit" and "Page 2edit" are the results after I completed formatting. You'll see my point that I'm trying to make a standardized book of diagrams.

The steps that I took to complete the formatting are as follows:
1.   Add Data Graphics field for System attribute
2.   Configure Data Graphics formatting (to Heading 2, center, below shape)
3.   Set page size to 8.5x11
4.   Remove title bars for Phase (not every used; only Function will be used)
5.   Format Container to 100% Transparent Fill (because otherwise the chart shows a white container when I convert to PDF
6.   Format Container margin to 0
7.   Format Container Size to Fit to Contents
8.   Auto Align and Space
9.   Manually play around with Swim Lane widths and diagram layout to fit into desired space
10.   Manually add Footer (designed separately; I cannot get the top container to align perfectly with the bottom container.)
11.   Adjust color scheme (using Theme)
12.   Populate Heading (3 lines)
13.   Manually change the fill color for the Subprocess stencil (unsure how to change the Master and cannot change it through the Theme colors because its white)