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Visio and SharePoint

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Creating SharePoint 2010 workflows with Visio 2010. The new Office 2010 clients have been released as a Technical Preview and I'm fortunate to get my hands on them and free to talk about them. The new clients are awesome! Visio is one of the applications from the Office suite that I use on a daily basis to design, model and draw diagrams, workflows and solutions. Visio 2010 has gotten a really nice facelift and a whole new set of features. The Ribbon has been one of the things I really missed in the 2007 release and the SharePoint integration , that can be seen in the Sneak Peak , looks awesome! Building workflows for SharePoint has mainly been done using either SharePoint Designer 2007 (dull and not reusable) or Visual Studio (complex). Visio 2010 comes with a brand new template; . You can design your SharePoint workflow just as you would design any other workflow using Visio, drag and drop and make a nice layout. The .vwi file is a zip compressed file containing the XOML files (XAML files for workflows) and some Visio information.

Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip. Visio Guy reader Sim sent me a request a few months ago for a Divided Box Shape.

Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip

You know, title at the top, description in the bottom portion. I’ve built lots of variations of this shape over the years, but I thought I’d do a super-duper, ultra-mega version this time. And I even threw in auto-numbering! We see divided box shapes all over the place. Data-base diagrams, UML and class-hierarchy diagrams. To edit the title, simply select the shape and start typing. And here is the full anatomy of today’s Super-smart Divided Box Shape: click to view larger image. Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip. Watching TV last night, I caught an ad out of the corner of my eye that had a neat graphic that I translated into a new Visio SmartShape for you to download.

Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip

But I’m not sure what to do with it, maybe you can help! The graphic that I saw showed this nice, thick black frame, with a caption underneath. The caption had this arrow that pointed up at the box which actually infringed on the frame. The arrow moved back and forth, but for what purpose, I do not know. Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip. I’ve seen much buzz lately regarding breadcrumb shapes in Visio.

Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip

Evidently a lot of folks are using Visio for IA and wireframes. Yup, you can lay-out and design web-sites with good ol’ Visio! So I decided to create a Visio Breadcrumbs Shape to help web-site designers more quickly finish their prototypes. This shape incorporates some smart-behavior that should save you a lot of time! Visio Breadcrumb Shape Features. Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip. Title blocks on drawings are important for many, many reasons.

Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip

If your company has created more than a small number of drawings, it’s useful to know who created them, when they were created, who updated the drawings, and when they were updated. Often times, copies of a drawing are e-mailed or sent in printed form to customers, installers, contractors, builders, inspectors. For these recipients, contact information and drawing scale data can be of utmost importance. As it turns out, much of the information that is imperative to title blocks is already in the drawing. Through Visio’s SmartShape features, it can automatically be extracted, eliminating the need to re-key it. Other information that is not available by default can be entered in a central location, or extracted from existing data sources, then displayed by cleverly-constructed title block shapes. Save Time by Using Existing Title Block Shapes The stencil is called: Title Blocks.vss. Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip.

Home » Shapes Judging from the view-counter and download stats for our post: Free Visio People Shapes, people just love free people shapes!

Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip

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! <Antonio Banderas> El Visioso </Antonio Banderas> has braved the dark waters of Visio’s ShapeSheet and added some pretty nifty options to his Emotional Little Dude. Here’s what you get: in just one action-packed figure, you can: Change the letter on his chest (via Shape Data)Change his genderSelect from five different emotionsReposition text block (via Control Handle) El Visioso - He loves Visio that much. Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip. Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip.

A recent Visio newsgroup post asked about customizing the output files from Visio’s Save As Web feature.

Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip

This rang a bell in the ol’ noggin, and I went searching for an old demo that exported a customized html page, with pop-up menus that displayed Custom Property (Shape Data) information. This demo doesn’t use Visio’s built-in Save As Web feature, but instead uses automation code in the form of VBA stored in the document. But before we talk about code, let’s explain how to use it. The imagined user-scenario goes like this: The user wants to highlight various items in her Visio document, such that viewers of the exported web-page can mouse-over special regions and see a pop-up dialog that displays info about that region. The way the document is built is as follows: Below, we can see the Hot Spot shape in action. Click to view larger image Once all of the hot spot regions are defined and configured, we simply right-click a blank area on the page and choose “Export” from the menu: Like this:

Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip. Every once in a while, a question comes along in the newsgroups that just screams at me; “WRITE SOME SAMPLE CODE!”

Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip

Now I can’t describe exactly which types of questions speak to me in this way. Perhaps they’re questions I’ve heard time and again? Or they involve a fascinating graphical problem? Or is it just that I can actually finish them in one evening’s work? Whatever the reason, the latest question is; “How do I export all of the pages in a Visio document to image files?” Well, the simple answer is to use the Page.Export function, and simply give the name of an image file as an argument. For instance: To do all the pages in a document simply requires a loop through each Page object in Document.Pages.

But that’s only half the answer. The big bone about programatically exporting images in Visio is that you can’t programmatically control the resolution of the output. You can set various options for the export, including the resolution, which is what most folks want to do. 1. Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip. So we’ve had this experimental Visio drawing containing crude attempts at 3D states laying around since 1993.

Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip

But we only had three states: Washington, Oregon and California. Well after a few years, a few new Visio features, and some wisdom gained, we’ve finally gotten off our butts and written a little code that helped us produce something a little more useful: an entire map of the USA, where each shape can be extruded into the vertical! Below, we can see an example of how the US State shapes can be brought into the 3rd dimension. You simply select a state, then pull on the little yellow Control Handle that appears in the middle of the shape. The extrusion is just a bunch of lines that map to the vertices of the shape. Click to view larger image. Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip. In this article, we share with you a dimension line SmartShape that can be calibrated to a scale on an imported image, and be subsequently used to measure distances in that space.

Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip

Since Visio is adept at importing images in a variety of formats, it can be a great time savings to start with an image as a background or basis for a diagram that you wish to produce. There are many scenarios where the imported art represents a scaled drawing, be it a map, a floor plan, or some other architectural drawing. In such cases, you might want to be able to accurately show the dimensions of various objects or the distances between points on the drawing.

But this can be difficult without first accurately resizing the image to fit a predefined scale. In the Visio file that you can download at the end of this article, you’ll find a master shape called Map Dimension. Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip. Home » Beyond Visio, Drawings & Templates Arno Nel has published links to a really cool set of Visio drawings that relate to Microsoft SharePoint on his blog: Arno Nel 2.0 – The Information Worker.

Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip

The diagrams illustrate models, scenarios, and flowcharts for planning, designing and deploying SharePoint installations. These high-quality Visio drawings were created by Microsoft for the Technet site, and include 16 model diagramss, 18 scenario diagrams and 3 flowcharts relating to SharePoint. That’s 37 awesome Visio diagrams in all! The diagrams are poster sized, but you can print them on regular Letter or A4 sized paper by using the File > Page Setup… dialog: Just click the Fit to radio button and enter 1 sheet across by 1 sheet down, then pray that your printer has a real high resolution.

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Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip. UserFocus has released a cool set of user experience shapes for Visio users that are involved with user experience activities or produce user experience deliverables. This free Visio stencil contains 34 master shapes that will help you to illustrate your research plan and show the types of deliverables you will produce. Who is UserFocus? The company graciously offering this nice set of free shapes is called UserFocus. Download Your Free StoragePoint Trial Now! Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip. Today I saw a question in the Microsoft Visio newsgroups. Stefan wanted to know how to make a 3D arrow look like it was going through a rectangular plane. Of course I couldn’t resist the opportunity to do some drawing, plus it seemed like a nice topic for today’s Visio 3D drawing tutorial!

If you’ve perused the Visio Art page, you might have seen this Pin and PinLoc illustration: or perhaps the Knife Through Iron Chef piccie: Both of these visuals have elements of what Stefan needs. Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip. The kind folks over in Redmond have informed the Visio Guy of some deals regarding add-on products from Visio partners. If you are an IT guy or do business process management, then you should probably check these offers out! There are seven free IT and BPM products on offer. While no purchase is required, you do have to do a tiny bit of work to get at them, as you might expect. When you click on one of the free-product links below, you’ll be taken to a landing page on Visio Toolbox, which corresponds to the product of interest. Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip.

Are you looking to create data-visualizations that relate to the people in your audience? Are you sick of pie charts and other boring graphics? Then you will be interested in the “Visio Village Diagram Template”, which helps you to illustrate data with a human touch. “Village Diagrams” I’ve been reading an interesting, creative and informative web-site called Information is Beautiful. As the title suggests, the site focuses on data visualization of issues, ideas and knowledge. One of the articles introduced me to the idea of the “If Something Was a Village of 100 People” style of graphic. Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip.

The creation of this page was inspired by this video of a guy drawing a custom sports car in MS Paint. It seems there’s an entire underground of folks creating art with an application that isn’t really up to the task. Like a haiku or sonnet, there seems to be something compelling about working within a constrained environment. Ideas, issues, concepts, subjects - v. Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip.

If you use Visio to make very long and wide swimlane diagrams, then you may be frustrated by the fact that Visio’s lane-headers only appear at one end of the lane. By the time you get to the other end of you cross functional flowchart, you forget who’s responsible for what, and why a shape is in a particular band. Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip. Have you heard about the Visio viewer, he’s a viewer but he still keeps on spyin’.

Ok, sorry about that Little River Band diversion. ANYway… SoftDimension Icons: Visio Icon. Sponsored links Follow us visio Search tag Good (10) Bad (0) Remove tag Icon Rating. View or print Visio drawings with Visio Viewer 2007 - Visio - Mi. Download MOOS Project Viewer 0.4 by MS Project Viewer. Description of MOOS Project Viewer program at Mac Shareware: Advertisements. Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip. Office 2010 betas are starting to hit customers hands (one way or another) and the buzz about Microsoft’s next big release is starting to pick up. I just watched a video that presented an overview of SharePoint 2010. There is a short bit about the new Visio Services for SharePoint, which look to be quite interesting! In the video, the guy talks for the first 10 or 15 minutes, using a lot of marketing speak that doesn’t really clear anything up. But he eventually gets to the demos, and they are quite interesting, and worth the wait.

The ribbon UI in SharePoint is pretty cool, especially after you kick yourself and remember that it is running in a browser! And there are lots of asynchronous improvements, so you don’t see the whole page flash and reload every time you click a button or select a list item. Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip. If you need to know how Visio shapes are glued together, and how to traverse paths through a process flow diagram, then this article is for you. You’ll learn about glue types, connector ends and order-of-connections. A beautifully formatted document, with accompanying VBA code will help you to better understand…your processes! Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip. If you are busy developing a Visio solution, you might run into the situation where you need to edit a Visio master using code.

Like any application that has survived the ages, Visio has its share black-magic techniques that lurk in dusky corners of the netherworld. Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip. In your quest to create a Visio-based application you’re not likely to find yourself stranded on a Visio-based-island. You’ll probably find yourself strolling through a land filled with other software products that need to join you on your journey. Integrating Visio 2007 and SharePoint Products and Technologies. Integrating Visio 2007 and Project 2007. Integrating Microsoft Office Visio 2003 with Microsoft SharePoin.

Integrating Visio 2007 and Active Directory. Visio Guy – Shapes, Stencils, Drawings Templates, Tutorials, Tip.