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You are here: Home / Shape Design / ShapeSheet Formulas / Taking Visio Actions Rows to the limit

Published on June 13, 2022 by David Parker

Taking Visio Actions Rows to the limit

I recently (re-)discovered that there is a limit to the number of Actions section rows that will be evaluated for display on the right mouse menu of a Visio shape. I have not hit a limit (yet) for the number of rows that can be added to the Actions section … so why is there a limitation to the number that will be displayed on the right mouse menu? In Visio for desktop, any rows over this limit will simply not be displayed, but in Visio for web it prevents any Actions from being displayed at all on the shape.

  • Visio for desktop evaluates the first 50 Actions
  • Visio for web can only display 49 Actions

Well, this limit is 50 in the desktop, and 49 in the web … which you may think is too many anyway, but the Visio ShapeSheet provides the ability to each row above or below the built-in menu, be invisible, be disabled, be read-only, and to group them in sub-menus or with spacers, so, given that a single Visio smart shape can incorporate many different options within it, then this limit can be reached unknowingly when creating custom Visio masters.

I often use the right-mouse menu to provide a quick way of changing Shape Data values that are available in a fixed-list. There can be many fixed-lists in a single shape, so there could be many synchronized Actions providing configuration options. Even the Microsoft provided BPMN shapes have 28 Actions rows currently, and I think I remember that there were more in earlier versions of Visio.

So, if your custom master shapes will be used in Visio for web, then you must never have more than 49 rows in the Actions section. It is acceptable to delete rows to keep to this maximum number.

If your custom master shapes will be used in Visio for desktop, then only the first 50 rows will ever be evaluated for display. You can have more than 50 rows in the Actions section but only use rows above 50 for use as menu rows for Action Tags. There appears to be no limit to the number of Actions rows that can be displayed under Action Tags which can be displayed in a many positions around a shape. However, these are a Visio for desktop only feature, and their display can be ugly on some graphics cards…

Using Notepad++ to Edit Visio ShapeSheet formulas

Visio shapes get their smartness from the formulas that are entered into the ShapeSheet, but editing these formulas can be extremely tricky and prone to error because of the lack of a modern programmer’s interface. Formulas can be quite long (up to 64k characters) but even medium size ones like the one in User.GetWorkdays cell…

Adding a second Function header bar to Visio swimlanes

I was recently asked if a second function header bar can be added to the swimlanes in the cross-functional flowchart templates in Visio. Some swimlanes can get quite wide, so it can be useful to have a duplicate function header shape on the far-side too. It is quite simple to duplicate the existing function header…

More Parsing XML Data in Visio Shapes

My last article looked at parsing an XML string with a known structure and order of elements and attributes. This can be acceptable in some scenarios, but what if the elements or attributes are in a different order? Then it is necessary to use the element and attribute names rather than their index position. This…

Parsing XML data in Visio Shapes

One of my current projects uses XML data, and some of the values in the XML data control the display and content of Visio shapes. Therefore, I looked deeper into how the XML data can be used directly to control parts of the graphics. Although the external data linking feature in Visio Professional and Visio…

Highlighting dirty text in Visio shapes

I suppose I should explain what I mean by dirty text first 🙂 I often display the value of a Shape Data row in Visio text, but sometimes the solution requires that the value is also editable. This is ok if the client accepts that all editing is done with the Shape Data window or…

My new book on Visualizing Processes with Microsoft Visio has launched

Back in the early 1990s, there was an application called ABC Flowcharter that was the market leader for diagramming business flowcharts, but some of the brains behind Aldus PageMaker saw an opportunity to create something smarter, and left to write the Visio product, with the stated aim to overtake ABC Flowcharter within 2 years. They…

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Filed Under: Actions, Shape Design, ShapeSheet Formulas, Visio, Visio for Desktop, Visio for Web Tagged With: ShapeSheet Functions, Visio

About David Parker

David Parker has 25 years' experience of providing data visualization solutions to companies around the globe. He is a Microsoft MVP and Visio expert.

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