viziblr

Fans of my Visio Power Tools for Visio 2007, should be pleased to learn that I've finally started working on a version for Visio 2010. Here's a preview.

First, it is integrated into the Office 2010 Ribbon.

Some small features are implemented already.

This creates an HTML doc of some stencils (.VSS files) in a folder. I previously implemented the catalog feature as a separate tool, but now it is integrated into my tool.

Here's my previous blog post describing the feature in much greater detail:

http://viziblr.com/news/2012/3/10/browsing-visio-2010-stencil-shapes-as-a-document.html

Import colors

Often I need to use a specific set of colors that someone from the design team has carefully picked. It is a real pain to convert some number like #2B2D42 into r,g,b integers for use in Visio's color selection dialog. When someone gives me a long list of colors, it gets even worse. So I built a little tool that lets you copy paste the colors as text and then a document will be created that uses those colors. As an example, here is the document generated from the sample text above.

Import Online Colors

There are sites online like colourlovers and adobe kuler that have some sets sets of colors. Instead of manually entering those colors, just enter the URL of the palette and a document will be drawn with those colors. Only colourlovers is supported right now. But, I'll add Kuler support shortly.

Below is the document that will be created:

Next Steps

• Adding features from the Visio Power Tools 2007 codebase into this version. Note that some features may not make it into this version.
• Overall stabilization and clean up
• Adding additional cool features
• “Beta” Release –  planning May or June.

If you have suggestions, let me know.