Blogroll

The quickest way to add and glue connectors to two shapes is to use AutoConnect. You can use AutoConnect while dragging shapes from a stencil onto the page, or to connect shapes that are already on the page. Read this article to learn how.

you can quickly build a rack diagram from equipment shapes that conform to industry-standard measurements. The shapes are designed to fit together precisely, and their connection points make them easy to snap into place. You can also store data such as serial number and location with the equipment shapes and generate detailed reports based on that data. Read this article to learn more.

Don't let your first glance fool you. Microsoft Office Visio 2007 is a lot easier to use than it looks. To get started, all you need to know are a few basic steps and terms. Before long, you'll be able to go from a blank page to a drawing that makes your point and looks great. Read this article to learn more.

Flowcharts are diagrams that show the steps in a process. Basic flowcharts are easy to create and, because the shapes are simple and visual, they are easy to understand. Read this article to learn more.

If you need more shapes than a particular Microsoft Office Visio template provides, you have a couple of options. You can either search Visio and the Web for shapes that Microsoft has developed, or you can search the Web for shapes that were developed by others. Read this article to learn more.

Check out the latest training courses for learning how to work most effectively with SharePoint document libraries.

You may want your workflow to collect information from the person who starts it, and then reference this information later in the workflow. You can set this up by adding custom fields to the workflow initiation form and requiring that the workflow be started manually.

Learn how to design a document review workflow and a custom Workflow Dashboard that shows you at a glance the status of all workflow tasks related to a specific document. This series of videos presents an end-to-end scenario, starting with the necessary site components and ending with saving the solution as a site template so that you can reuse it. Along the way, see how to design several secondary workflows and learn how to use a wide range of workflow lookups.

Explore Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 with training from Microsoft experts, right from your desktop. Download a simple file to get the grand tour of the latest features and changes, including a deep dive on how to build sophisticated composite applications on the SharePoint platform, a thorough review of the SharePoint Workflow Designer, and an explanation of the powerful tools at your disposal to customize SharePoint sites.

This video series shows you how to quickly and easily build complex business solutions on the SharePoint platform. Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Business Administrator Training is a one-and-a-half hour, 300-400 level training series, produced in collaboration with the SharePoint Product Team and Total Training.

This article introduces variables and describes the different types that are available. It also shows you how to create new variables and presents a scenario that demonstrates using variables in a workflow.

The community at CodePlex has made available this project, which provides a set of custom workflow activities to make it easier to create advanced workflows with SharePoint Designer 2007.

Learn how using views in SharePoint can help you focus on the information that's most important to you on a SharePoint site.

This short demo shows you how to work with views in SharePoint to find the information you need.

Learn about personal and public views and how to create them to see items in a list or library that are most important to you.

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Whatever data source you use in your application (SharePoint list, SharePoint library, database connection, etc.), you almost certainly will need to work with date values. Displaying a date value in a Data View is a fairly simple matter; you add it as you would any other column. But filtering or conditionally formatting based on date values is a more complex capability to build. In this article, I'll show you how to build rich date-value capabilities with minimal effort.

Learn how your team can use a wiki to gather and share ideas on a site quickly.

Your team can edit a wiki by adding content and links.

Learn how to create and view a version history of your wiki, and even restore a previous version if you make a mistake.