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Happy birthday to me - free shape for you

John Goldsmith's profile image

John Goldsmith

06 October 2008
  • ShapeSheet

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Question: What have Britt Ekland, The Moulin Rouge and this blog got in common?

Answer: They were all born today, 6th October.

While both Britt Ekland and The Moulin Rouge already have a number of birthdays under their belts this is the first for this blog.  To celebrate I thought I'd hand out a free calendar shape by way of a small thank you for reading. (Download Calendar.vsd)

Calendar shape

I'm not going to go into lots of detail about the shape, but there's a couple of interesting points that the shape demonstrates:

1) Flexible font size - The shape's text font size increases and decreases in line with the original size and this is based on a technique described by Chris Roth of Visio Guy over here: Text resizing with ShapeSheet formulas

2) Lookup and Index functions - To include the correct date suffix (ie 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc) the shape uses two very handy ShapeSheet functions to 'Lookup' the 'Index' of the date in an array of dates.  This index is then used to return the corresponding value in an array of suffixes.

LookupAndIndex

The rest is pretty standard stuff including a couple of right-click actions where you can choose to use your own date or, the date when the shape was dropped on the page (or when the 'Use custom date' option was last toggled).

Anyway, do add a comment if you have a question about the shape, but otherwise thanks for reading.

Microsoft MVP Logo

John has been a Microsoft MVP, in the award categories of Visio and M365, since 2008.

Visio Blogs

  • Bill Morein (via Wayback Machine)
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  • David Parker
  • Eric Rockey
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  • John Marshall
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Visio Resources

  • Developing Microsoft Visio Solutions
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  • Office 2010 Engineering
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  • VisioMVPs.org
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