With Office 2007 & 2010 coming up with a Ribbon, Struggling to find where the command / feature you used in Office 2003 was, might not be uncommon. Having spend time 'searching' for the commands myself I understand the pain.

A nice tool from Microsoft Research came to the rescue. The Final version known as the "Office 2007 Search Commands Tool" , it was a neat plugin. ( read = needs to be installed + overhead of a Plugin ).

You can download it from here. http://www.officelabs.com/projects/searchcommands/Pages/default.aspx

Unfortunately it was not updated for Office 2010 but then something better came up; An interactive guide. This Application will display an image of Office 2003 / 2007 from where you can select the option you want, the Equivalent in Office 2010 is immediately displayed.

Here is where you can access the interactive guide.

"http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/learn-where-menu-and-toolbar-commands-are-in-office-2010-and-related-products-HA101794130.aspx"

- Sachin Filinto

I love Microsoft products. Here is an example of why.  Working for Microsoft I get to play around with them for free. This Blog is an example of what I am talking about.

A couple of years back my mother started documenting our entire extended family. ( which is actually four different trees spanning at least 6 generations. After splitting the largest tree there were at least 75+ names left on a single sheet of paper.

The best my mother could do was glue two or more large sheets of Foolscap paper together to write this down. When I saw this I immediately thought of digitizing it and thought it will be a weekend activity.

Circa 2005; Internet to the rescue ! And after exploring many propriety software available on the internet I had to rule them all out one by one. Reasons varied from un-friendly interface to propriety methods of storage. ( considering that I would be sharing this out to the extended family for possible  updates or simply viewing )

Finally after many hours spent exploring and ruling out options I zeroed on Visio after seeing how somebody else had done it. ( Website no longer available. )

I found this options scalable and  somewhat convenient, but it was not to be.

In Hindsight I believe my approach needed some fine tuning. I built my own templates for the common shapes like male, female, married, child, etc. ,etc.

I got started assembling the bricks, and that’s when I realized how dam difficult aligning and sizing the different shapes is.  And I had not even started putting details. Picture how aligning all the above shapes into the below would be like.

Each shape is in fact a simple grouping of discrete lines. With no other choice I carried on the cumbersome task to putting all the objects together. Not regularly but when ever I had some free time on a weekend.

All This happened sometime in 2005 and till December 2008 I was barely 25 % done with the entire tree in spite of spending a lot of time on this. I did think of Exploring AutoCAD but it was not to be. ( remembering my AutoCAD days in 1998-99 )

In December 2008 when I was somewhere 25% done with the tree I met a colleague who was the Expert on Visio & who's job profile was to demonstrate & sell Visio to customers  ( he actually sat right next to me for a very long time).  In some discussion on Visio I mentioned to him I was in progress of creating this family tree and was having a tough time. That’s when he suggested why don’t I type the names in Excel File and simply import them into a Visio file.

How ingenious ! But I dint know how that could be done. A couple of minutes later he was showing me the organizational chart feature in Visio.

Here is what he did.

File > New > Organizational Chart.

Created a Couple of Objects, then exported the file to excel.

Looking at the excel file I immediately understood how Visio built the hierarchy. Just 3 columns matter and additional 2 columns for the name and title.

• Unique_ID

Each person must have a unique ID

• Reports_To

Which should have the Unique_ID of the parent

• Master_Shape

For the identifying shape from the library.

In Short, we reverse Engineered the Visio file into Excel to understand the Required fields.

What I got :

• Ability to build a diagram from scratch with virtually no skillset in Visio.
• No messy aligning , shapes, grouping & un-grouping. ( Trust me this can be Really Messy )

• Just Type all the details in Excel & simply import them into Visio.

So, Put the Data into Excel & it take less then a minute for importing. ( compared to many many many hours doing it the old way. )

I can also simply e-mail either the Visio or a Jpeg file to the extended family. Or if I need some help in filling out the details I simply e-mail the excel file to relatives & ask them to fill it up.

( every one has Microsoft excel )

In hindsight I feel like an idiot for having spent so many hours attempting to do it using my own template :(

Some problems I faced on the way & how I resolved them:

1. Every Spelling update made resulted in the Visio needing a re-import.

Thus I needed to make the Visio dynamically linked to the excel file. If the excel file is updated it should reflect in the Visio without re-importing it.

Done. It was a simple option in Visio.

2. I need to figure out how to maintain the order when the file is imported into Visio.

i.e.  Elder Siblings should be to the left of their younger sibling.

I put an additional field which had a number. So after importing the excel file, I displayed the number to sort out siblings. Then hide the number.

3. Printing Across multiple Pages. ( 2 Problems here )
   1. Margin the Printer leaves

I knew that all printers have a limitation to printing right to the edge. But dint know how much I could push the printer I was using. After wasting many sheets of paper I decided not to bother. Simply chop off the extra paper with a blade.

2. Overlap Printed ( a couple of mm )

Dint bother fixing this. Simply cut a strip off along with solution of point a.

Going ahead I need to solve the following challenges:

1. Differentiate Male & female.

I have used two master Shapes ( manager & delegate ) mapping to a Descendant & His / Her Spouse.

If I need to Differentiate between Male & Female, I would need four master Shapes

(Male Manager, Female manager, Male Delegate & Female Delegate )

Given that there are no more shapes to be used I might need to create some custom shapes. ( Non-Standard - not going to attempt it just yet  )

What I lost:

• Unique shapes male and female. ( I Think i can workaround that by creating a custom shape but not going to attempt it just yet )

• A lot of time I spent on the old method.

==========================================

Some Statistics:

• 4 Family trees - 1 for each Grand Parent. ( 1 Tree split into 2 due to size, so 5 Trees )
• 390  different persons.
• Largest tree of 135 Individuals
• Up to 6 generations Documented.
• 13 A3 sheets of Paper for printing in landscape mode.
• Many Hours to put it all together.

Unfortunate that i cannot upload the tree over here.

Adding further value:

1. Put this up on a website. ( Ahh…. That’s another Blog topic )

2. Capture as much information as possible in the excel file and look for ways to put it up  on the Visio.

( DOB, DOD, Photo, Etc )

Credit also to a friend of mine who tickled me into moving forward.

- Sachin Filinto

When i Travel the Juices of thought flow. given that i have been Travelling this week after a long time, got many thoughts in my mind. so i am just completing a couple of blogs.