Since I’m swamped with work, let’s pick some low-hanging fruit for the first few entries...

Abbreviations (in an ORM Source Model, go to the Abbreviations tab via Database | Options | Document...) and their use in name generation has always been one of the coolest features of the (now) Visio line of ORM tools.

You’ll notice that the list is pre-seeded with words to automatically omit (that is, their abbreviations are blank) when generating the names of logical/physical schema elements. However (and unfortunately), it is no longer pre-seeded with words from the ORM Model semantics itself, as was the case in InfoModeler/VisioModeler.

If you like, you can maintain an abbreviations list in Excel. This is useful if you have corporate naming conventions ruthlessly enforced by the Standards Police™ or otherwise want to quickly add an abbreviation scheme into a model. Unfortunately, it uses an old inheritance mechanism (*):

1. Click on the upper left square sandwiched between the “1” and the “Name” headers
2. Ctrl + C
3. Open Excel and click on the upper left square sandwiched between the “1” and the “A” headers
4. Ctrl + V

(*) An old joke from my Visual FoxPro days when the only way to inherit in VB was Crtl + C, Ctrl + V

To (ahem) inherit from Excel to Visio, simply reverse the process by switching the order of steps 1 and 3. You are going to want to familiarize yourself with this process as this is the only way to sort unruly abbreviation lists. Like the unshod shoemaker, we have no automated repository for these things. Believe me, if the list was accessible from the API, I would have done something this before I wrote the XML Export code.

Finally, if you import an InfoModeler/VisioModeler imo file into an ORM Source Model, you’ll notice that the abbreviations are missing entirely. Given the above, I think you can figure out how to quickly get them in there.

Despite my griping about lost/missing functionality, the abbreviations list is handy. Besides, I haven’t checked in a while, but no other mainstream database modeling tool could match the naming functionality of VEA. I’m going to talk more about using abbreviations in future entries when I cover the name generation features of VEA in general.