SMS Visio Utils User Guide - Square Mile

1 SMS Visio Utils user Guide 1 SMS Visio Utils user Guide Author: Robert Cowham, Square Mile Systems Last Updated: 2013/07/31 #12 Version: Synopsis: This describes the Visio Utilities and shows their usage and function. Contents: 1 Introduction .. 3 Installation .. 3 Contact Details .. 4 Release Notes .. 4 2 DC Layout - Laying out cabinets on a page .. 5 The final result .. 5 Create Scaled Page with appropriate Background .. 5 Setting up a Spreadsheet .. 6 Create a Simple Cabinet Master Shape in your own stencil .. 6 Linking Data to a Spreadsheet .. 7 Resizing all shapes in one action .. 8 Laying out many rows of cabinets in one action .. 9 DC Layout Options .. 10 3 DC Floor Tiles .. 11 Create Grid from Shape .. 11 Label Shapes .. 12 Some example output.

2 13 4 Diagram Linker linking shapes to pages in other diagrams .. 14 Linking the diagrams .. 14 5 Diagram Publisher - Saving pages for the web .. 16 Learning About Data Graphics .. 16 Apply Data Graphics .. 16 Saving as HTML or PDF .. 17 6 Diagram 20 Selecting Connected Shapes .. 20 Filtering Shapes .. 21 Selecting Shapes by Data .. 22 7 Network Organizer .. 25 Showing and Hiding Ports .. 26 Power Topology Diagrams .. 27 SMS Visio Utils user Guide 2 Switch Connections .. 27 8 Miscellaneous .. 28 Remove ShapeNum Event .. 28 9 About Functions .. 29 Show Help .. 29 Check for Updates .. 29 About SMS Visio Utils .. 29 SMS Visio Utils user Guide 3 1 Introduction This is the user Guide for the SMS Visio Utils addin a freely available addin from Square Mile Systems.

3 The main features are: DC Layout - Automating the resizing of shapes for scaled data center floor plans and automating the layout of cabinets in floor plan diagrams into rows (horizontally or vertically) DC Floor Tiles Automating the creation of a grid of shapes such as is often used for floor tiles, as well as the application of a sequence of numbers or letters to selected shapes. Diagram Linker Automatically links shapes on the current diagram to pages in details diagrams. Diagram Publisher - Automatically saving diagrams to HTML (web) pages with appropriate data graphics applied to each page Diagram Organizer - Selecting and filtering hierarchical diagrams of shapes to allow trees or related shapes to be selected, and also filtered (to hide unrelated shapes) Network Organizer Laying out connections for network topology diagrams, including automatic spacing, and being able to turn port names on or off very useful for showing switch or patch panel patching diagrams.

4 These functions are made available through a Ribbon tab ( Visio 2010) or via an Addins menu ( Visio 2007). See diagrams below: Figure 1 - Visio 2010 - the SMS Visio Utils Ribbon. All commands are available on this ribbon or via the right click menu. Figure 2 - Visio 2007 - the SMS Visio Utils Toolbar. Visio 2007 does not have the ribbon feature so commands are available on a specific toolbar. Installation Please download (and run) the following file: SMS Visio Utils user Guide 4 (the path is documented in the email you will have been sent) If you run it will validate any prerequisites ( Microsoft .Net Framework ) are present and offer to download them for you if needed. It will download and run , which will download and run Some users have had spurious warnings from Symantec s Norton Anti-Virus about our download this is a false positive due to the relatively small number of times (in internet terms anything less than tens of thousands is a small number!)

5 The addin has been downloaded. If you receive this warning then you can try directly downloading and running that. Please note that you will require sufficient user permissions to be able to install COM addins in your user profile you may need to consult with your local systems administrator. Contact Details For support you can email us: The product web page is: You are welcome to contact us if you are interested in a custom version of the Addin. Release Notes These are available from our web site: SMS Visio Utils user Guide 5 2 DC Layout - Laying out cabinets on a page The final result Figure 3 Final floorplan result. This shows cabinets in a scaled data center drawing. The selected cabinet has shape data associated with it such as Name/Width/Depth and the shape has been sized appropriately.

6 Note that some of the cabinets are different sizes the selected cabinet (C10) has a width/depth of 800x800mm whereas the cabinets in row A and B are all 800x1000mm. Each cabinet has shape data attached to it with fields such as Cabinet_Width, Cabinet_Depth and Cabinet_Name. It is fairly easy to resize a few shapes manually (or using the Size&Position window shown above), this becomes more time consuming and error prone if you have hundreds of cabinets, and a reasonable percentage of those are non-standard sizes. So how do we easily achieve the above? Create Scaled Page with appropriate Background You can create a new page diagram based on one of the standard Visio templates, Maps and Floor Plans > Floor Plan. Make sure that you set an appropriate scale (in Visio 2010 right click Page name > Page > Drawing Scale tab) to represent the size of your DC.

7 SMS Visio Utils user Guide 6 Using shapes from the stencil Walls, Shell and Structure you can draw room walls, plus other fixtures such as doors and/or windows and put them on a background page. Put all the appropriate background detail on to a background page and then switch to the foreground page to actually insert cabinets. Setting up a Spreadsheet Create a new spreadsheet with column headers in it. You need to have three columns with the following names (other columns can contain any attributes you have data for): Cabinet_Name Cabinet_Width Cabinet_Depth Note that Width and Depth are assumed to be in mm (millimeters) if you are importing to a diagram page which is scaled in metric units, or assumed to be inches if the diagram is scaled in US Units (or Imperial) see Layout Options section below for ways to change this.

8 See the Video for how to use the standard Visio Link Data to Shapes function to open up your spreadsheet. Create a Simple Cabinet Master Shape in your own stencil From Shapes tab, use More Shapes > New Stencil to create a stencil. Create a cabinet shape (set it to a default size) and drag and drop it into the stencil suggest you rename the master shape to Cabinet . SMS Visio Utils user Guide 7 Linking Data to a Spreadsheet Figure 4 The process of linking data. As shown in the video, click Link Data to Shapes on the Data tab and then select your spread sheet and click Finish. Figure 5 Put shapes on the page. Having linked data, we can drag and drop all rows on to the page, thus creating a new shape for each one, together with associated shape data. SMS Visio Utils user Guide 8 Resizing all shapes in one action Using the Resize Horizontal button on the SMS Utils ribbon tab, we can resize all currently selected cabinets in one action as shown above.

9 This reads the values from the shape data fields Cabinet_Width and Cabinet_Depth. If your cabinets are in vertical rows, then you will probably want to choose Resize vertical . You may wish to do this for only some particular shapes ( PDU shapes where the width is positioned vertically whereas most of the cabinets have width horizontally) as shown in the drawing in section 1. SMS Visio Utils user Guide 9 Laying out many rows of cabinets in one action By selecting the option Left to right, top row first we get the shapes laid out as shown above. This is not difficuly to do manually with only a few shapes, but when you have hundreds of cabinets in a data center it becomes rather more painful! Note the eight different layout options some of our customers have several different data centers and a different layout for each one.

10 The utility uses the shape data field Cabinet Name to decide which row a cabinet is in (see Layout Options below for how to change this). The default behaviour is to put cabinets in rows next to each other. In the exampl shown in the results diagram, the cabinets in row C need to be positioned in smaller groups, spaced around the pillars in the hall. The accompanying video (see product web page) shows all the steps in more detail, including linking shape data to a spreadsheet. SMS Visio Utils user Guide 10 DC Layout Options Figure 6 Layout options. These are the options for DC Layout, explained below. Shape Name Property this is the name of the shape data property that is used to calculate which row or column the cabinets should be placed. For cabinets it is usual for this to be Cabinet Name.