Customer Reviews

Learn Visio 5.0 for the Advanced User

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This intermediate to advance coverage was very nicely treated (although not quite as smooth as his beginning material). I covered a number of advanced topics and explained most of them well. Exercises were educational and hints were invaluable. I'm going to look for more of Grabowski's titles in the future.

I did wish that the ODBC database section would have covered connecting existing Visio shapes to databases better instead of concentrating on connecting master shapes. This might just be more personal in nature as I had an existing 40-page project I had to modify and I need a little more direct help connecting existing shapes to databases.

Though shape sheets were covered, VBA was definitely not. It seems any serious application development would require at least VBA support. Basically, I need to get another book to solve my problem.

I was very disappointed that programming Visio with Visual Basic for Applications was "too advanced" for this so-called "Advanced" book.

On page 9 of "Learn Visio 5.0 For the Advanced User", the author writes: "In NURBS all weights are equal; in NUBS weights can be unequal". In fact, the exact opposite is true. The weights associated with the control points in a NURBS curve will, in general, NOT all be equal to each other; they can, indeed be all different. Moreover, you can think of a NUBS curve as a NURBS curve in which the weights are ALL EQUAL to 1.0. In Visio 5.0, the Freeform tool produces splines that are NUBS curves. The mathematics of spline curves can get rather complex, and even though this book stays away from the mathematical details ( which are not necessary for someone to use spline curves in their drawings ), it is important to keep the terminology straight.