Customer Reviews

Visualizing Information with Microsoft® Office Visio® 2007

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
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I want you to think of the stereo typical college level professor who drones on while writing on the chalk board. Is the professor dumb? Of course not. Does he lack the ability to teach? Yes. This author portrays himself as a user who got tired of depending on IT for meaningful reports. I see this author as a geek's geek. He can quote Visual Basic in his sleep and does so throughout this text. However, this author lacks perspective. He thinks we all just take one look at his VB and a 100 watt light bulb pops-up over our heads. And just like a professor he drones on in his book without approaching a subject from a different perspective. If he's so good at Visio - why didn't he include example diagrams? Just to clarify - I have no problem with Visio books going into VB - my problem is when they don't approach the subject from multiple perspectives to reach more hearts and minds.

I enjoyed the author's casual conversational tone through much of the book. It had a lot of good info, some of which was valuable if you were sitting at a keyboard and followed along step-by-step. The author provides a download site for the code within the book, which is a nice alternative to those book CDs that always end up lost.

As a reference, the text wasn't perfect. I think it was really designed to be read rather than thumbed through.

This book is great if you have previous programming experience. For someone with none, the sample scripts are hard to understand as there is no explanation for functions, variables, syntaxes, etc. Wish the book title or description clearly stated "Smart Diagrams for VBA-savvy Business Users" . Or the author would provide more insight into how the scripts work, so that your average business user can apply the examples to their own needs.

With a product that has the depth of Visio for data visualization, it's a tough target to create a document that has the breadth of that which David attempted with this book. Most of the material currently being developed, and published on-line, use languages such as C# or C++ which are (IMHO) out of sync with the community that works with Visio on a day to day basis. Since VBA support is native to the product the user doesn't require additional products to test the concepts that David covers. David has provided many examples of how to use Visio for visualization of real world business projects. As an added bonus the ability to download each of the chapters code and documents allows the user to apply them on their own systems and then port them into solutions they may wish to develop. His style is readable and approachable and the examples work 'out-of-the-box'. It's a worthy companion to David Edson's and Graham Widemans works on Visio development.
Al Edlund
Executive Consultant
Altus Technologies

I bought this book in paperback and Amazon "upgrade" e-edition.

The e-edition worked the first time, letting me search and read the book right from my computer. The next time I went back to it, it would no longer let me search. Further, there does not seem to be a way to download it or view it on my iPhone so I must be connected and at a computer. The reader software is somewhat random as well but is livable on screens taller than 900 pixels (run little netbook, run). Basically my first and last Amazon "upgrade".

Next, the bonus code connected to this book: Maybe I missed it but I did not see the URL for the code in the beginning of the book like most that have companion web downloads. [...] has a "Download" link on their main page but this book is not represented there. You need to find the paperback book description page to find the link. Here you will find a poorly crafted website with broken CSS in Firefox 3.5.5, IE8 or Chrome. You must download the code individually for each chapter by scrolling to the bottom of each chapter page, pressing Reset and entering a word from a page it displays. You need to do this for all of the chapters which gets really annoying, especially when some words are not accepted even though they are correct. It says all this is because of size but I have downloaded 7 of them so far and it's only 7mb. It takes longer to navigate, press reset, find the page, enter the word than it does to download the content. Now that I look at the files, they also seem to have the same random named Zip files so I will need to dig through them to figure out what I need. Bonus material or not, it goes with the book and is part of the purchase price, I should be able to download it in some convenient manner.

I definitely wont be looking at another Osborne book unless it is a last resort.

I have been using Visio and programming solutions based on Visio since 1992. I loved David Parker's book, found it easy and entertaining to read, and use it frequently as a reference.

Whether you are a developer creating a Visio-based solution, or are a competent Visio user, this excellent offering will help you push Visio 2007 to new limits!

Visualizing Information with Microsoft Office Visio 2007 is not for novice users, but if you are comfortable using Visio and have no trouble browsing to data stored in Microsoft Excel or your company's databases, then you will benefit from reading this book. If you are a developer looking to create a graphical application based on Visio, well, this is a no-brainer purchase: Just get it!

While much of the book contains code samples in Visual Basic, there is still a wealth of information for power users that don't want to delve into code.

You will get a lot of information about how to use and create solutions using the new data graphics and data linking features of Visio 2007, which don't require coding, but can be extended to wonderful new heights with the addition of a bit of automation.

For years, Visio aficionados and developers have praised the virtues of Graham Wideman's Visio 2003 Developer's Survival Pack. As time marches on, and it becomes uncertain as to whether an update to the `Pack is forthcoming, we are fortunate that David Parker has stepped forward and produced a worthy successor to Wideman's masterpiece.

I also found this book to be a great preparation for the Microsoft certification exam 70-545 (TS: Microsoft Office Visio 2007, Application Development)

I find that the book enabled me to view Visio in a different context. It has allowed me to be a better designer and a source of knowledge for other individuals down the line. Very well written and very thorough.