WYSIWYG editor for smartart graphics

[Nob]

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

while experementing with creating custom smartarts I had a idea. Editing the
xml code is not easy, but the potential of dynamic scaling illustrations is
great.

My idea:

Microsoft creates an WYSIWYG editor for smartart graphics. By creating and
moving shapes, customers create a data model and a layout and map the
elements in a kind of table to each other. In that way many companies could
quickly create their own powerful tools for dealing with the most common
graphics. As a next step I imagine the possibility of making one smartart
graphic becoming an element of another one for creating complex
illustrations. Furthermore the ability to turn them would help a lot too.

What do you think about my idea?

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[Echo S]

I love this idea and have also been asking for it for quite some time.

 

[Bob Buckland ?:-\)]

Hi Nob,

A tool and additional assets to create SmartArt graphics was promised for Office 2007, including to the author of 'the book' on
SmartArt Graphics,
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/0768668360
but the tool hasn't yet materialized. If it does it will likely be as a project on Microsoft's http://codeplex.com . It's scope
wasn't as full featured as yours, in part due to limitations on the 1st generation SmartArt feature across Office although much of
that could likely be done with XSLT and XML.

Hopefully we'll be seeing more in Office-Next (v14).


=================
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

while experementing with creating custom smartarts I had a idea. Editing the
xml code is not easy, but the potential of dynamic scaling illustrations is
great.

My idea:

Microsoft creates an WYSIWYG editor for smartart graphics. By creating and
moving shapes, customers create a data model and a layout and map the
elements in a kind of table to each other. In that way many companies could
quickly create their own powerful tools for dealing with the most common
graphics. As a next step I imagine the possibility of making one smartart
graphic becoming an element of another one for creating complex
illustrations. Furthermore the ability to turn them would help a lot too.

What do you think about my idea? >>
--

Bob Buckland ?
MS Office System Products MVP

*Courtesy is not expensive and can pay big dividends*