Comments on Three Visio Tips: Special Deliverables #4

sara mclachlan — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 23:32:02 GMT

Love the tips!

Is there anyway to tab between shapes? I can numerous shapes (with text) connected, and I want to be able to move from one to the text while typing without having to use my mouse and click on the next shape.

Ben Weagraff — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 22:20:23 GMT

Hi Dan!

I loved your piece. I was wondering if you could help me out in another way. I have a list of 100 items (text) that I want to put into a visio shape. The list of 100 items fills up the entire page, so I was wondering if there was a way to split the visio shape into three columns of 33 items. Can this be done? Do you know how?

Thanks,

Ben Weagraff
benjamin.weagraff@accenture.com

Keith Porterfield — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:35 GMT

Regarding the printing issues: it’s a miracle these pages even render at all. MoveableType is emitting horribly invalid markup (nesting errors, unreferenced character entities, etc.), then putting an XHML 1.0 Strict doctype on it. Just feed one of these URLs to the W3C validator to see what I’m talking about. This markup actually crashes the print formatter in Mozilla-based browsers.

Funny, I thought content management systems were supposed to help alleviate these issues.

stewart dean — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 14:28:49 GMT

Some day someone will create a true information architecture tool – one that works the way we work. Till then why are we still using Visio? For it’s flexibility and speed using Flash MX (and especially 2004) allows very rapid working with multiple layers, multiple pages and is generaly a quicker program.

stewart dean — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:35 GMT

Some day someone will create a true information architecture tool – one that works the way we work. Till then why are we still using Visio? I have to use it but having tried several different programs the one that beats all hands down has to be the Flash authoring program. For it’s flexibility and speed using Flash MX (and especially 2004) allows very rapid working with multiple layers, multiple pages and is generaly a quicker program. The customisation options are also huge compared to Visio.

Dave — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:35 GMT

hey there folks, did anyone else notice that the “print” version of this doesn’t do the tables of the article correctly?

On a more relevant note … Thanx for sharing the F4. I had always assumed it did the ctrl+Y command.

—dave

erin — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:35 GMT

Another short cut I use often is to create my own custom palette with the shapes I use most often – pulled from all the other palettes. In addition to the premade shapes, you can create your own – shapes, dialog boxes, other elements and then pull them into a palette that can be saved and then used across any document. This becomes a much more global tool than backgrounds, which are document specific.

Michael — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:35 GMT

Great tips Dan! Thanks for publishing them.

USING BACKGROUND PAGES
Another tip that I don’t to see mentioned often is the ability to use background pages to repeat elements of wireframes. For an x-windows application I worked on a while ago, a lot of screens had to be wireframed for a functional spec and I was finding myself duplicating common shapes over and over—e.g. main menus, forms, etc. So what I did in Visio 5 was create a series of background pages and use background pages as background pages to thos background pages. Sounds confusing, but let me explain.

I have these background pages:
1. Screen and main menus
2. Data entry form a
3. Data entry form b

2 uses 1 as a background page so the screen and main menus appear. I can create a foreground screen using 2 as a background and overlay values over the form to mimick some user interaction. I can also create new foreground screens with background 3, which also uses 1 as a background page. If I ever need to make changes to global elements I just change the background page 1. This has helped a lot when iterating through screen changes.

To make things even cooler, I can make each of the menu objects in background page 1 a link to a foreground page, so that if I export the entire thing as html and have a clickable prototype.

Andrew — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:35 GMT

I just wish visio would adopt standard keyboard shortcuts.

Kevin White — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:35 GMT

I quite agree. Perhaps it’s more an internal politcal battle. Visio is safe for me to use because it is not very faithful. Illustrator and Photoshop are Visual Creative Design tools and the property of visual designers only.

Of course that hasn’t stopped me from screen capturing a browser window and using it as a background in Visio.

;-)

Dan Rubin — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:35 GMT

Kevin: I agree with your complaint about Visio and pixels, but you could (and should) save yourself the trouble by not using Visio for UI design in the first place.

Visio is just not meant for UI design, it’s meant for structural design, things like IA, network maps, flowcharts, etc.

You will find work much more pleasurable if you use Illustrator or Photoshop for all UI comps (I prefer Illustrator because everything in a layout remains flexible and changeable, but I still use Photoshop for my fast comps), and just use Visio for designing the underpinnings.

At that point, the pixel issue, well, isn’t :-)

Cheers,

Dan

Joe — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:34 GMT

Very nicely done. Now we need Jesse to write the OmniGraffle version…. :)

charles s — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:34 GMT

I have been working with visio for a couple of years now but i still appreciate a good tip.

Kevin White — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:34 GMT

Great article. Those tips are really useful.

There’s one thing about using Visio that really troubles me. What’s the point of using a diagramming tool for computer interfaces that does not understand pixels?

Am I the only one that has had a team member ask “Looks great but it will it fit?”

Andrei Herasimchuk — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:34 GMT

Using Visio to help create “information architecture” diagrams is like using PowerPoint to help create “presentations.”

And I’m with Tufte on this one…

Andrei