Automatically displaying Visio shape text in other shapes

There are times, in Visio, when you just need to ensure that the text in a primary shape is synchronised with the text in different secondary shapes … even if they are on different pages of a Visio document. My previous article, Forcing Display Update of Inherited Data Values , describes a method of synchronising the values in Shape Data rows from a central data source in the document, and that allows for the values to be viewed and edited in multiple pages or shapes. However, the text of a Visio shape is different because it is not stored in a single ShapeSheet cell, so how can you display the text of one shape in another?

In this example, I have a primary rectangle which I can edit the text of. I then have other secondary shapes that need to display the text of that primary shape.

First, you need to get the name of the of the primary shape. This can be read on the Shape Name dialog from the Developer tab.

Select the secondary shape, then click Insert \ Field \ Custom Formula.

If the primary shape is on the same page, then can be:

=SHAPETEXT(Sheet.1!TheText)

However, if the primary shape is on a different page, then a reference to that page must be included:

=SHAPETEXT(Pages[Page-1]!Sheet.1!TheText)

This short video shows this process…

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