Visio Congress Shapes

This post is inspired by the US mid-term elections back in November and I thought I’d put some shapes together in Visio to represent the Senate and House of Representatives.

Every time there’s a new round of elections, I head off to Wikipedia to find out a little more of how government and the electoral system works across the pond. The visual style of these shapes is therefore based on the images on the United States Congress page in Wikipedia, although it wasn’t until I finished my Visio version that I realised that the ones on that page are SVG based and generated using an online tool called Parliament Diagram, so do check that out as well.

If you just want to download the shapes and use them as they are, then you can click on the following link, which contains a zipped up .vssx stencil. If you drop the stencil into your 'My Shapes' folder, under Documents, it will popup for both Metric and US Units drawings when you click on the 'More Shapes' menu:

• Stencil download - Congress.zip

Senate (100 seats)

House of Representatives (435 seats)

Basic operation

The stencil contains two masters: 'Senate' and 'House of Representatives'. Both shapes are constructed in a similar way and support up to five ranges, with each range being mapped to a party.

The label and color for each range are set by sub-selecting the respective legend item and editting its text (F2) or setting its fill.

Once the labels and formatting are set you can then set the data for the ranges via the Shape Data window:

Finally to get a better picture of how each dot is arranged, you can turn off the 'Hide index text' context menu item which reveals the indexing system and identifies how each index is ordered based on its radial position and distance from the center.

In the next post, I'm going to go into some of the specifics of how the shapes are constructed.