Visio 12 - Eric Rockey

Do You Share Diagrams On A Server?

MSDN Archive — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Do you ever put Visio diagrams on a SharePoint site, Web site, or file server so you can easily share them with others? Are you making use of Visio 2007’s Data Link and Data Graphics features? If so, the Visio Product Planning department would like to talk to you! We are currently conducting research to understand how our customers would like to share diagrams inside their organizations.

If you think you can help us with this area (and would like to help chart Visio’s future), simply contact us.

DXF, DWG & Visio

MSDN Archive — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 15:52:00 GMT

Hey!

Do you ever open, save or use AutoCAD files (DXF/DWG) with Visio? If so, the Visio product team would like to talk to you. Please drop us a line, and we’ll be in touch.

A LOT more information on creating custom data graphics

MSDN Archive — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 16:48:00 GMT

We keep on hearing requests for more details on how to create your own data graphics. Bill Morein's post gave you the basics, and now Mark Nelson on the Visio PM team has written a much more detailed article on this topic (and data graphics in general) and posted it up on MSDN: https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa468596.aspx . This should give you everything you need to roll your own text, icon set or data bar callouts. Looking forward to seeing some of the new ones that folks come up with!

Everything you wanted to know about Themes and shapes

MSDN Archive — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 12:47:00 GMT

Tim Davenport, a Visio Program Manager on my team, has written an MSDN article that gives a ton of great information about our new themes feature and in particular, how to design Visio shapes that work well with themes. Check it out here: https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa445858.aspx

Announcing the Visio Customer Council

MSDN Archive — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 20:14:00 GMT

Hi all,

We're currently recruiting for the Visio Customer Council, which is a great way to have an early impact on the next version of the product. Please read below to see if you are interested. For all of you RSS aggregators, forgive the spam if you're getting this on the other Visio blogs too - we wanted to make sure that everyone who's interested in Visio saw it.

Thanks,
Eric

---

We're always looking for ways to better understand the needs and concerns of Visio customers. To that end, one of the tools we use is the Visio Customer Council.

Council members are uniquely positioned to have their voices heard by the designers and developers of Visio. Members can provide feedback on proposed features and interact, face-to-face, with the Visio product team. Council members share their views in person, through regular conference calls, and in electronic mail.

There are a limited number of Council member positions, and members serve for a period of one year. We are recruiting for the 2006-2007 council now.

If you are interested in helping shape the next generation of Visio, we'll ask you to:

Participate in monthly conference calls with the product team;
Come to Redmond at least once a year to attend an in-person, two- or three-day Visio Customer Council Symposium;
Review and provide detailed feedback on proposed features designs;
Install, use, and provide feedback on Visio beta software;
Respond to questions from the product team via phone or e-mail;
Host Visio product team members at your place of business from time to time to understand more about how your and others at your organization use Visio;
Sign a nondisclosure agreement with Microsoft.

Since the readers of this blog are among the most dedicated Visio users, we'd like to give you the opportunity to join the Council. If this sounds like something that would interest you, please contact me by e-mail, and we'll get our Planning group in touch with you.

Creating custom data graphics

MSDN Archive — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 20:24:00 GMT

One of the things we keep hearing from customers is a desire to make their own Data Graphics instead of using the ones we provide with Visio 2007. This is completely possible -- we designed Data Graphics to be extensible. Bill Morein, a fellow Visio blogger on my team, has posted some initial information on how to do this at https://blogs.msdn.com/wmorein/ . We're working on complete documentation for how to do this and will publish that in the future. But this should get you started for now if you are interested (plus Bill's got a lot of other good stuff to read about Visio).

Now everybody can try out Visio 2007

MSDN Archive — Thu, 25 May 2006 18:31:00 GMT

There’s been a lot going on this week that I wanted to let you know about.

First of all, of course, Office 2007 Beta 2 (including Visio) has been released and is publicly available, which means that everyone can download and try out this huge release. Beta 2 looks good across the board and Visio in particular is ready to have its tires kicked. Check it out: https://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx

We’ve also released a Beta 2 version of the Visio 2007 SDK. This includes new wizards for working with Visual Studio 2005, and new code samples that show you how to program against our new data features. You can download the SDK here: https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=373D34B8-5EF7-4E6E-A582-C8D6B5EE4E33&displaylang=en

Next, the Visual Studio team has made available a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Visual Studio Tools for Office “v3”, which adds support for Visio for the first time. This is exciting news for Visio add-in developers. Go here to download it: https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=68978824-CA55-4208-A55E-5C4858183B31&displaylang=en#Overview (One note is that you need to follow a specific installation order: Visual Studio 2005, Office Beta 2, and then VSTO. This is described in the instructions at the bottom of the download page.)

Finally, I’m very excited to announce that we have launched a Visio team blog called “Visio Insights”. This blog is aimed to help you get the most out of Visio and help everyone see what’s possible with our product. The topics will cover everything from end user functionality through developer features, and isn’t necessarily tied to Visio 2007 – we’ll be covering the breadth of what Visio can do, including features that were around in Visio 1.0: https://blogs.msdn.com/visio/ . The first post of Visio Insights also includes a good list of all of the other people out there blogging on Visio.

I’ll still be talking about Visio 2007 features here, but I encourage you to give Visio Insights a read as well.

Themes: Great Results in a few clicks

MSDN Archive — Tue, 09 May 2006 20:45:00 GMT

Hi, I’m back again from another round of traveling (thanks for the messages from people wondering where I was!) and I’ve still got more new features to tell you about in Visio 2007. This week I’m going to spend some time talking about the new Themes feature and some of the other improvements to how diagrams are formatting that we’ve been working on.

One of the things that really struck me when we went out talking to customers during the planning phase of Visio 2007 was how many Visio diagrams are being used in presentations, and how the graphical quality of Visio diagrams was becoming increasingly important. Visio diagrams used to be more technically focused, and the formatting took a distant second place to the content. This is changing. Frequently the diagrams were being used to propose a new business system to upper management, whether it was an improved business process, an addition to the IT network infrastructure, or a new organization structure. In these situations, having the diagram look sharp and professional becomes crucial to being able to sell the idea. The content is still the most important aspect, but being easy on the eye isn't just fluff anymore.

Today in Visio 2003, you can make some terrific looking diagrams. The problem is that you really have to dig deep into our formatting UI and perform a ton of tweaks in order to get there. You’d have to navigate among all of these menu items, each which takes you to a big multi-tabbed dialog, in order to format everything:

And you’d have to do this for each different type of shape in your diagram. This takes more time and expertise that most people are willing or able to spend. Even then, some of our shapes did not behave very well when formatting was applied to them (I’m talking about you, network equipment shapes!).

Here you can see what happens in Visio 2003 when you apply a fill color to one of the new network equipment shapes. All of the detail and shading of the shape gets washed away and replaced with a single color of red. So even if you did spend a lot of time formatting in Visio, you might not get the best results.

The main feature we are adding in Visio 2007 to help make formatting your diagrams easier is called Themes. What Themes allow you to do is to format your entire document at the same time with a couple clicks. We’ve shipped a set of pre-defined Theme Colors and what we call Theme Effects (combinations of line styles, fill styles, text formatting and shadows) that have been created by designers to look great together. To use Themes, you simply click on different thumbnails for Theme Colors and Theme Effects in the Themes task pane until you find a combination that you like for your diagram.

This applies formatting to every shape in your diagram all at once. So you can quickly go from this:

To something that looks more like this:

Visio 2007 provides about 36 sets of Theme Colors and 14 sets of Theme Effects, and by mixing and matching between these two, there are hundreds of formatting combinations. You can also define your own Theme Colors or Theme Effects. So if you want to create a specific corporate look for all of your company’s diagrams, you can do so and share that with everyone in your organization.

In addition to the set of colors and effects that we provide, we’ve also done a lot of work with our shapes in Visio 2007 to make them work better with Themes and with formatting in general. We took a look at some of the more complex shapes such as the network equipment shapes that were introduced in Visio 2003 and came up with ways to apply formatting in more precise ways. So now instead of creating that weird red-looking computer I showed you above, with Visio 2007, the computer would look more like this:

We’re also introducing an updated set of shapes in Visio 2007 that have a richer, more 3D look. These shapes are new versions of the “workflow” stencil shapes that are in previous versions of Visio. They are great for showing different departments in a company or different stages of a typical business process. Here are a few examples of the shapes:

And here is how they react when a green Theme Color is applied to them:

So you can see how the main part of the shape picks up the green color, but the details don’t lose their own specific colors. The same thing would happen if you selected the shape and choose a green fill color. This makes it a lot less painful to apply colors to the more complex shapes than it was in Visio 2003. The Color By Value feature in Data Graphics also benefits from these improvements, so you can use Color by Value to color different network shapes based on server status, for example, and they will look great.

So imagine that you’ve applied some Theme Colors to your diagram and you want to go in and add some accent colors to specific shapes to call them out. In the flowchart above, for instance, I called out the “Start” and “Paperwork verified” shapes by making them a different color. You also probably want these accent colors to go well with the general Theme Colors you’ve applied to the diagram. And if you change to different Theme Colors, the accent colors should still go well with the new colors. To help enable these types of scenarios, we’ve also updated the color picker in Visio 2007 to be Theme-aware. Now you can pick from a large range of colors that are based on the currently selected Theme Colors, and also from a set of “Standard Colors” that are generally useful (such as red, yellow and green). Here’s what the new Theme-aware color picker looks like:

If you pick colors from the “Theme Colors” part of the color picker, you can be sure that the colors will go well together, and will also update when you change to a different set of Theme Colors using the task pane. If you pick colors from the “Standard Colors” area, these often have a specific meaning (such as using green to call out positive trends) will always remain constant even if you change Theme Colors. And of course you can still go in and define your own custom colors if you don’t find the exact right color in the ones we provide.

I hope that gives you a quick idea of the ways we are working to make it easier to create a great looking diagram in Visio 2007. One final thing I wanted to mention: when you are happy with how your diagram looks and maybe want to include it in a PowerPoint slide deck for presentation, we've also done some work to help your diagram look good on the slide. Visio 2007 will ship the same set of Theme Colors as PowerPoint 2007, so you can go in and make a Visio diagram match the colors in your presentation.

PivotDiagrams, part 1

MSDN Archive — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 21:19:00 GMT

Hey, what's up? I'm back from a little break after the Visio Partner Conference. Today I'm going to talk about the last of the major data features we are doing in Visio 12: PivotDiagrams. You can think of PivotDiagrams as similar to PivotTables in Excel. They allow you to work with data where you want to see groups and subtotals. The difference, of course, is that a PivotDiagram does this visually as a diagram:

They are great when you need to communicate the key pieces of information in your data to other people in a very visual way. It's also easy to drill into your data with PivotDiagrams and find exactly the right parts of data that you want to present. PivotDiagrams can take advantage of all of the power of Data Graphics that I've been showing you in previous posts, so you can create some graphically rich ways to show your data.

So how do PivotDiagrams work? They are a new diagram type in Visio 12, so to use one you simply select the PivotDiagram template in the startup screen. This triggers the Data Selector wizard that lets you choose which data source you want to connect to (PivotDiagrams are always connected to external data). PivotDiagrams can connect to Excel, Access, SQL Server, SQL Server Analysis Services, SharePoint lists, and other OLE/DB or ODBC data sources.When you select your data source, you end up with a single shape in your PivotDiagram that shows you the sum total of all of the rows in your data. Here we are looking at data showing the performance of different call center locations for a corporation:

By default we pick a total for you to get you started, but you can easily change which totals are displayed over in the PivotDiagram task pane.

Simply check different totals and they will appear in the diagram (similar to PivotTables). In this case, we are adding totals for the Solve Rate of customer calls:

Once you have the totals that you want to display, the next step is to choose how you want to break out your data into groups and subtotals. To do this you use the "Add Category" control in the task pane. Simply click on one of the categories to break out the currently selected shape. In this example, I'm breaking out the totals by the different types of calls: Hardware, Software, etc:

You can keep on breaking out the subtotals as well. So I could select the "Software" shape, and break these totals out by the different priorities of the calls:

So you can see how it's easy with PivotDiagrams to drill into your data and find the key pieces that you want to communicate. You can also re-pivot the data by a different category. You can select the root shape, and choose a different category to drill on. This will remove all of the other shapes and drill in on the new category (in this case the call center locations).

Now this is showing comparative data for the different call center locations around the U.S. We can go in and add some Data Graphics to show the data in richer, more visual ways. In this case, the Customer Satisfaction with the different call centers can be visualized as a speedometer data bar, and we can also show a trend arrow indicating if customer sat is going up or down:

We could leave the PivotDiagram like this -- it's already showing us some important information in a visual, easy-to-understand way. But since this information is geographically related, it might be even easier to understand if we placed it on a map. This brings us to another important point about PivotDiagrams: you can easily customize the layout to better communicate the data. While they start out looking like a tree diagram, similar to an organizational chart, this is just a starting point for you to customize to suit your needs. In this case, you can simply select and delete the connectors between the shapes, drag out a U.S. map shape to the page, and place the different PivotDiagram shapes in their appropriate locations around the map:

Once you end up with a graphic that you are happy with, you can save it and refresh it on a regular basis as data changes. This is an easy way to create a graphical report that can be distributed to everyone on your team to keep people updated on current status. In future posts, I'll show you some of the pre-defined PivotDiagram reports that we are shipping as part of Office 2007.

Visio Conference Recap

MSDN Archive — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 15:20:00 GMT

Wow, what a couple of days it's been at the Visio Partner Conference! The level of excitement has been fantastic, and the new data features have been received very well. Steve Ballmer started things off with the typical Ballmer enthusiasm Thursday morning with a joint Visio and Project Keynote. He featured a great demo from a partner called INS that is working on a Sarbanes-Oxley compliance solution. It deeply integrated Visio 12 and SharePoint and took advantage of our new data capabilities. Compliance is a huge amount of work for corporations today, and a big part of this requires visualizing all of the processes in the company in order to guarantee that they are appropriately managed. Visio plays a major role here, and solutions such as the INS one that handle end-to-end management of the compliance work are a logical next step.

I presented an overview of all of the features we are doing in Visio 12 as well as a deep dive into the Data Link and Data Graphics features. So many partners have come up and talked to me afterwards about how they can't wait to take advantage of these new features -- it's really going to make a lot of their scenarios so much easier to do. The amount of response has really floored me. We spent the rest of Thursday giving more details of Visio 12, and on Friday, a series of presentations on developer issues and partner solutions. My boss, Richard Wolf, gave a keynote Friday, focusing on the partner opportunity in three top growth areas: IT, Business Process Excellence (which includes compliance) and Information Reporting and Analysis.

I think the overriding theme at the conference is "Visio is back". Any lingering doubts people may have had about Microsoft's commitment to Visio have disappeared as everyone saw how much work we have been putting into this next release and the level of enthusiasm that is on display here. I saw tons of cool solutions built on Visio in all different areas: information reporting diagrams showing sales statistics overlaid on top of retail store layouts, partners who have been working with Beta 1 and can already auto generate data connected network diagrams from MOM and SMS data, even entire sugar processing plants visualized in Visio! And too many others to name here. To everyone who attended and those who presented -- thanks for making this such a big success!