Easy Timelines in Powerpoint

What do you do if you don't have Microsoft Project and you need to quickly put a project timeline on presentation? Do you create it in Excel and then copy it to presentation? Or use rectangles and text frames in Powerpoint?


Now there's an easier option, use Office Timeline plugin. More details here: https://www.officetimeline.com/


Sample image

Tabbed browsing in Office Documents (Word, Excel, Powerpoint)

Came across this nice Office add-in that enables tabbed browsing and editing in Office programs (Word, Excel and Powerpoint). This is really useful if you work on multiple documents as this also means that your taskbar has only entry rather than one for each open document.


For more details and download, head on to http://www.extendoffice.com/product/office-tab.html

Some screenshots:

Visio | Copy Foreground and Background

In Visio when you select all shapes and do Ctrl + C (Copy), it only copies the foreground. To include the background in the copied shape, follow these steps:

1. Click on an empty space to deselect all
2. Select Edit -> Select by type...
3. Click None and OK
4. Select Edit -> Copy Drawing

Now the background will be included in the copied diagram.

Firefox | Selecting Cells or Columns in Table

If you are interested in selecting individual cells or a column from a table on a website, Firefox provides a quick way to do that... Just CTRL+Click the cells or column to select the data required. Saved me lot of time when I was collecting data for my project :)

Create Table of Contents in Visio

For a project of ours, we were creating visio files with many flowcharts in it. One feature we found missing was to create Table of Contents. So I searched online for a macro to do that for me and I found one here http://www.welie.com/visio/index.php. I modified it a little bit so that it works top down and creates ToC in FIRST page. The updated macro can be downloaded from here http://sites.google.com/site/davendraupreti/uploads/Hyperlinked_ToC_macro.vss.

When executed, the macro...

1. Deletes any exisiting content
2. Creates ToC headers
3. Creates ToC Content with page number
4. Copies the ToC Content to clipboard, in case you want to copy it in a mail and send it to PM :)

This is how the ToC looks like

http://sites.google.com/site/davendraupreti/uploads/Visio_ToC.jpg

If you want, you can customise the macro to suit your needs. Please feel free to comment if you find any bugs :)

Table of Contents in Visio

Got this nice macro for generating Table of Contents in visio file, not sure why Microsoft has not included it by default.

The URL for the macro is http://stephenturbek.com/2007/04/automatically-create-table-of-contents.html

Visio Tip #2: Export text from Visio

There are situations when we want to export text from Visio diagram. For e.g. the other day I wanted to export sever Name and IP addresses from a physical diagram. I hoped to find something like Save As text etc. But then I stumbled on this blog http://kenfallon.com/?tag=visio-export-text. Copying the steps here in case link dont work

• Visio 2003 go to Tools -> Reports.
• Visio 2007 go to Data -> Reports.

These instructions are for Visio 2007.

• Make a new report and select Shapes on All pages or Shapes on the current page.
• Then select only (you may want to Show all properties to make sure nothing else is checked)
• Give it a Title e.g: Text Only Report
• Give it a Name e.g: Text_Only_Report
• Then select run and export it to either Excel, HTML, Visio Shape or XML

In the future when you want to extract text all you need to do is run Data -> Reports select Text_Only_Report and press Run.

Visio Tip # 1 : Reduce size of file

Sometime during the course of time, the size of Visio increases manyfold, sometime reaching upto 6-10 MB. Even if you zip it, there is not much help. But there are some options for reducing file size suggested by Microsoft. You can find them at this URL http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305025. The suggestions are to

• Remove unused shapes in the local stencil.
• Configure Visio to save the drawing with out a preview picture.
• Reduce the number of grouped shapes.
• Convert duplicate shapes to a single master shape.
• Do not save your diagram as a XML for Visio drawing