Chapter 10. Sharing Data Diagrams

In previous chapters, you learned how to create data diagrams with Visio. Unfortunately, not everybody has the Visio application installed on their Windows PC.

This chapter discusses the various ways that a Visio data diagram can be shared with others, and it explains how Visio diagrams can become an interactive visual dashboard either within Visio (in SharePoint or Office365 web pages), in the Microsoft Visio Viewer (published as web pages), or as another file format.

This chapter includes some VBA macros that contain the principles for actions in any other coding language. There is some sample JavaScript for interacting with an embedded Visio document.

In this chapter, we will learn the following topics:

• Viewing with the Visio Viewer

• Embedding within SharePoint web pages

• Printing to paper, PDF, and XPS

• Publishing as web pages

Thinking about sharing

This book is all about Visio as visual information. Shapes in Visio are obviously graphical, but they contain data and hyperlinks. There is no doubt that the richest experience of a Visio document is with the Visio application. However, this is not always possible, so an alternative experience is often necessary. Some of these methods can provide access to the data and hyperlinks, either fully or partly, but some methods reduce Visio to providing purely graphical output. Perhaps this is when Data Graphics are at their most important because they visualize the information without the viewer needing to select a shape.

There are also times when the data in shapes is sensitive, and providing access is not desirable.

Viewing Visio documents without Visio

The simplest way to provide viewing of Visio documents without Visio is to use the Microsoft Outlook desktop application or Windows File Explorer. Microsoft Outlook uses a Visio previewer that can display Visio files either included as e-mail attachments or within SharePoint document libraries, as shown in the following screenshot:

The Visio previewer is the Microsoft Visio Viewer control, but a lot of its functionality has been hidden to reduce it to viewing graphics only.

Embedding the Viewer in a Windows desktop application

The control uses ActiveX technology and has an API that provides developers access to each shape and their data labels and values, as well as hyperlinks. It also has the ability to switch layers off and on. It is a shame that these functions are hidden inside Microsoft Outlook.

However, the Microsoft Visio Viewer control can be inserted into a Windows application, such as Microsoft Excel. It is listed as Microsoft Visio Document when...

Sharing a Visio document

If a Visio document is stored in OneDrive, then a link to the file can be shared via an e-mail. The intended user can be provided with edit or view permissions, and the user can be forced to sign in with a Microsoft identity first, as shown in the following screenshot:

The preceding e-mail is sent automatically, but the Email option will create a proposed e-mail using the installed e-mail client.

The PDF and XPS options are discussed in the next section.

Exporting a Visio document

The following screenshot shows the File | Export options that are available:

Creating a PDF or XPS document

Microsoft has included the ability to create PDF and XPS documents from a Visio document. These have the ability to set the specific pages and some graphical properties. However, neither method provides the option to include Shape Data, and they only enable the first hyperlink on each shape. This is disappointing since both PDF and XPS are capable of much more.

These outputs can be created in code using the Document.ExportAsFixedFormat() method; take a look at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff766893.aspx for more information.

The following screenshot is of the Options dialog for PDF, but XPS is the same except for the PDF options, ISO 19005-1 compliant (PDF/A):

I have always felt that XPS (Extensible Paper Specification) is a good idea that has not been exploited by Microsoft. XPS has an API (take a look at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library...

Summary

In this chapter, we learned about the different ways of sharing Visio documents, especially those that contain data and hyperlinks. This has included viewing Visio documents directly or by converting them into other formats.

In the next and final chapter, we will discuss the options for deploying solutions.