Visio Map of Russia regions

Visio template containing all regions of Russia. The regions were designed to work as all other Visio-based maps (e.g. world map, europe map), and alike.

Each region shape in a stencil is equipped with shape-data which includes region name (in English and in Russian), region code, macro-region name, capital, and some other potentially useful fields. You can easily bind this to some data you have to build a nice diagram with external data, e.g. see examples below with "macro-regions" and "population".

You can use your custom data (e.g. from Excel file) to add some extra information to the map, e.g. to color it by region:

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Demo_VisioMap1.zip (746.1 KiB)

Also you can bind that data to shapes – e.g. I used excel file from the official site as "external data" to show population (also Visio theme applied):

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Demo_VisioMap2.zip (1.0 MiB)

Please check out also functions "Arrange to Page" and "Arrange to Shape" from the "world map" shapes.

After you drag the shapes you want to use onto the drawing page, you can arrange them to form a region as follows:

Press SHIFT and then click to select each of the shapes.
Right-click one of them, and then click Arrange To Page.

Visio will automatically place corresponding shapes together. If you want the map shapes to fill the entire drawing page, select the Size shapes to fill the drawing page check box. To add more shapes to a region:

  • Drag the additional shapes onto the drawing page.
  • Press SHIFT and then click to select each of the new shapes.
  • Right-click one of them, and then click Arrange To Shape.
  • On the drawing page, click a shape in the region that you want to align the new shapes to, and then in the Arrange To Shape dialog box, click OK

The map is available in 3 fashions – zip file with template/stencil and installer for Visio x86/x64.

FileDescriptionSizeDate
RussiaMapVisio_04_2012.zip RussiaMapVisio 04 2012914.3 KiB04.04.2013
VisioMapOfRussia_20_04_2013_x64.msi Maps of Russia regions (Visio template and stencil, packed in installer for Visio x64)600.0 KiB20.04.2013
VisioMapOfRussia_20_04_2013_x86.msi Maps of Russia regions (Visio template and stencil, packed in installer for Visio x86)596.0 KiB20.04.2013
VisioMapOfRussia_20_04_2013.zip Maps of Russia regions (Visio template and stencil, in zip file)489.1 KiB20.04.2013

Map of Russia in Visio

This is Visio map of Russia (year 2012). The map is in Visio VSD format. Includes a stencil with all regions as separate shapes and "assemled" sample drawing. The map was built to work nicely with the standard Visio "maps" functionality (like World Map), and additionally includes items which are specific to regions in Russia (region ISO code, capital, etc) as shape data. Download and details follow.

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Continue reading“Map of Russia in Visio”

Find Visio Command Addin

Have you ever tried to find a particular command in new Visio 2010 user interface? This was a little bit frustrating for me and I decided to develop a simple add-in which allows you to quickly find commands in Visio 2010. Just type in the keyword which is a part of command name, and hit enter. All commands which contain this keyword will be shown by the plugin as buttons. You can either use the command found directly from the results pane, or add it to the quick launch toolbar.

The big picture:

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Video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJowDTZXihI

Using the same set of button images with transparency in all Visio versions

If you write a Visio add-in that targets multiple Visio versions at the same time, and have some custom buttons with images (with transparency), you might run into trouble with that new Visio 2010 Ribbon user interface needs different “flavor” of images compared to Visio 2003 and 2007. So you’ll have to to either create two separate sets of images (one set for pre-ribbon version of Visio, the second set for the ribbon one), or to “dance around a little” and make both versions consume the same set of images. The article focuses on the second approach I ended up with.

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Persisting Visio shapes

This article explains this post in microsoft.public.visio.developers newsgroup, and provides information on how one can to save Visio shapes in external source exactly, so here is the code to store master/shape in a stream and then drop it back to the document:

To save Visio shapes in some external system (persist them) you can:

– Query master or shape you want to persist for IDataObject interface.
– Using this interface, obtain data blob in “Visio 11 Shapes” clipboard format (or maybe actually anything that contains “Shapes” word to be compatible with further Visio versions, please refer to the code).

Now this blob can be stored any way you want (database/memory/file/whatever). The sample code just saves it to a string variable in base64 encoding. To drop shapes back to the drawing, you can use “Drop” functions of Visio document/page. It turned out that these functions are happy enough with plain IDataObject interface passed in. So, to drop the stored master or shape back to the drawing:

– Create you own object that implements IDataObject interface.
– Load this object with your data
– Pass this object in one of those “Drop” functions (e.g. Page.Drop)

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Making the Visio ribbon tab document-dependent

This post explains how to make a ribbon tab in Visio 2010 ribbon document-specific. Means, activate a custom ribbon tab only for a specific document.

This article discusses the implementation of a document-specific tab in a COM add-in; also, it focuses on details you might be interested in if you e.g. program unmanaged C++. Note that you could create a custom document-specific ribbon by other means, e.g. by embedding your custom interface in a document template using new Visio 2010 property Document.CustomUI

Nevertheless, one of the ways to it is

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