3. Adding Excel Charts to Your Diagrams
If
you have Microsoft Excel 2010 installed on your system, the Chart
button appears to the right of the Clip Art button on the Insert tab.
This feature enables you to quickly add Excel charts and associated
data to your diagram. The effect is the same as copying a chart from
Excel and pasting it to Visio, which is arguably an easier way to go
about it.
Figure 5
shows five versions of an Excel chart embedded in Visio.
The lower right chart object has been
activated for in-place editing by double-clicking. Once opened, Visio’s
Ribbon is replaced by Excel’s until you finish editing. In fact, you
don’t even see the chart, because the data tab (Sheet1) has been
selected, and values are being edited.
To
finish in-place editing, click a blank area in the drawing or press the
Esc key. If you exit editing while the data tab is active, you will see
a table in Visio rather than a chart, as the “MW” table in the
top-right corner shows.
When
charts are resized, they do so intelligently. Notice how the three
charts—which have identical data—aren’t simply stretched or squished.
Fonts aren’t warped, the title text wraps, the chart labels rotate to
best fit the space, and the number of grid-lines changes to fit the
space.
If you don’t like the cramped environment of
in-place editing, right-click a chart and then choose Chart Object,
Open. This pops up the chart in a separate Excel window, where you can
make changes as you normally would. When you’re done, close the Excel
window.
4. Importing Vector Graphics
Just as you can import bitmap images, you can also import a variety of vector-based graphics files.
Using File, Open or Insert, Picture, you can set the file-type filter to one of these formats:
Scalable Vector Graphics (*.svg;*.svgz)
AutoCAD Drawing (*.dwg;*.dxf)
Compressed Enhanced Metafile (*.emz)
Enhanced Metafile (*.emf)
Windows Metafile (*.wmf)
Because these files are vector-based, you don’t have
to worry about jaggies on resizing, opaque blockish backgrounds, or
compression.
After you import a graphic, you can add text to it
as you would any Visio shape. The vectors themselves are inaccessible,
however. For example, if you change the fill color, you just set the
color for the background rectangle, which usually isn’t what you
intended.
If you don’t need to alter the colors or bits of an
imported graphic, just leave it alone. If you do need to modify pieces,
you can convert the graphic to Visio-native objects. Just right-click
and choose Group, Ungroup.
This conversion isn’t always perfect and comes with
occasional oddities. Sometimes you might get duplicate shapes: one for
the outline of an object and one for its fill. Sometimes gradient fills
end up as hundreds of thin rectangles. In addition, advanced,
unsupported effects from SVG files can end up as bitmaps.
