Our MVP community has been quite busy creating new resouces for Visio. We'd like to highlight a few recent releases here. In response to a newsgroup discussion on Visio's Network Rack shapes. Chris Roth (Visio MVP and former employee) has released a new shape for displaying rack unit dimensions . http://www.visguy.com/2007/04/01/rack-unit-dimension-line/ Second, the latest version of the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) Modeler add-in has been released. To quote from the add-in description: "The Microsoft...

There have been several newsgroup postings about using VSTO to create Visio Add-ins. The deployment of these add-ins can be especially challenging. There is a new developer article by Chris Castillo detailing how to write VSTO add-ins for Visio. Chris explains why using VSTO is desirable and aggregates information from a number of sources to walk you through the development and deployment process. http://blogs.msdn.com/chcast/archive/2007/03/28/creating-visio-add-ins-with-vsto-2005-se.aspx .

A Visio user posted a question in the newsgroups about the yellow text control handle on connector shapes. Some connectors have a yellow handle and some don't. What's going on? Starting in Visio 2003, the built-in connector shape used by the Connector Tool was modified to include a text control handle. If you start a blank drawing and click on the Connector Tool you should get this version of the shape. Note that you must enter text on the shape before you see the text control handle. This shape...

Judging from the page view statistics on the blog, Data Graphics is a topic of interest to a number of people. For those interest in the previous post on building custom data graphics, look here . In this post we’ll look at another way to get more out of the data graphics you create. Our example will focus on the sales data for a fictitious furniture company. Our goal is to use Data Graphics to show financial data about each product. We have data for the Product Name, Revenue and Expenses associated...

This post is part of a series examining Bubble Chart diagrams. We are building a Bubble Chart stencil from scratch to make diagram creation easy for the user. You can get the completed stencil from the first post in the series. In the previous post , we completed the Bubble Chart master shape. This shape is the background for the chart. In this post we will build the Bubble Data master shape. Bubble Data shapes are placed on top of the chart to display information. The Bubble Data shape will hold...

This post is part of a series examining Bubble Chart diagrams. We are building a Bubble Chart stencil from scratch to make diagram creation easy for the user. You can get the completed stencil from the first post in the series. In the previous post , we started working on the Bubble Chart master shape. It captures configuration information from the user when the shape is dropped on the page. The information along with the chart shape's boundaries are stored in properties on the page. Now we will...

In the previous post we introduced the Bubble Chart diagram and demonstrated a quick way to create one using the BubbleChart.vss stencil. This stencil was custom-built for the blog, so grab the file attachment from the previous post. Now we build the stencil from scratch to understand how to integrate Visio 2007's Data Connectivity features with shape design. There are two shapes in the BubbleChart.vss stencil: Bubble Chart and Bubble Data. Bubble Chart is the background shape that defines all the...

A Bubble Chart is a diagram that presents multi-dimensional data in a graphical form. Each data field is tied to a particular visualization. Most often data controls the Size and Position of elements in the chart. Thus the diagrams often resemble a bunch of bubbles. Taken to an extreme, data can be visualized in almost any way such as Color, Shape, Line Thickness, Shadow or any other formatting. As the data grows more complex, it becomes more important to find effective ways to present it. Bubble...

In this post, we take a break from Visio 2007 information and explore a peculiar shape design issue. If you have worked with Groups in Visio, you have probably encountered a situation where the shapes inside of a group just don't behave properly during resize. Sometimes you want shapes inside a group to resize with the group. Sometimes you don't. Visio provides a setting to control the resize behavior, but you may be surprised how it works. Enter ResizeMode. ResizeMode is the name of the Shapesheet...

Every once in a while a new feature idea comes along that is so unique and compelling that it revolutionizes the way people work. Insert Text Box is not such a feature. Adding text to a diagram is nothing new in Visio. However, usability studies have shown that adding text is one of the more challenging tasks for new users. Thus we added Insert Text Box to Visio 2007 to make diagramming a little more approachable. Insert Text Box is a menu command that invokes Visio's Text tool. Choosing the command...