Map of Texas Counties

Started by cahowell, January 14, 2015, 06:19:26 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

cahowell

Hello all, I am new to this forum and Visio in general, but have a good working knowledge of maintaining "already made" Visio diagrams. However, I have been recently tasked with creating a new diagram that not only outlines the state of Texas, but outlines each individual county within that outline along with their names if possible. I have been searching the web for a template to purchase, but cannot find anything of use and have downloaded the geographical shapes from MS, but it just gives me the outline of the state and not the counties within.

Does anyone know how I can accomplish this or have any recommendations?

I have attached an small example of the diagram I am using for Tennessee.

Thanks in advance for your help!!


Adam

Yacine

Hi Adam,
I did a quick search in google images for texas counties and svg.
I then tried to load directly the map in visio. It was too big.
I then converted it to wmf and repeated the import.
I removed the black background as well as the outline (well, this file had them) and voila!
I leave it up to you to either put the proper custom props on the county shapes or directly name them.

Yacine

cahowell

#2
HOLY COW!!! You are awesome!!! I very much appreciate your help!

Can you do this with ANY map/image? If so, are the exact steps to do import it in your previous post? I don't know what the 3 letters you are stating are, could you elaborate a tad on that for me? Sorry, I am a noob.

Yacine

Hi Adam,
There's nothing awesome here, that's just plain vector graphics handling.
Yes, you can do it with any map. Just look for a vector format like svg or wmf.
If it's a bitmap format (jpg, png, gif, ...) then you need to vectorize it first.
You can use Inkscape for the vectorization.


Regards,
Yacine
Yacine

cahowell

Yep, it's awesome that you took the time to not only help me, but tell me how to do it myself and I appreciate that.

Thanks again!

cahowell

I was testing the steps and converted an additional GIF file using Inkscape to SVG. This may sound like a silly questions, but I am curious as to what steps I needed to take to upload/import into Visio 2013 in order to have all the counties as an individual objects so that I can edit them. I am sure it is something simple that I am missing...

P.S. When I open my GIF file in Inkscape, it asks if i want to link or embed the image, what should I choose?



Thanks!

Yacine

Hi Adam,
if the result of the import are lines instead of individual shapes, you can try to 1) JOIN, then 2) FRAGMENT them. (To find in Shape/Operations/..)


When you vectorise a bitmap in inkscape new objects are created. It doesn't probably make a difference whether the original is embeded or linked. It's the new objects, you're looking for.
Yacine