Smart Radio Buttons and Check Boxes in Visio

A recent project requires an interactive tutorial within Microsoft Visio desktop where a lot of the questions need a single answer using radio buttons, or multiple-choice answers using check boxes. I thought that this would be a great use of the list containers capability because the questions and answers could be part of the container shape whilst the individual questions are presented as items in the list and automatically inheriting their particular question text from the containing list shape. So, this article provides these smart master shapes, and explains how they are built.

There are four masters in the Document Stencil which contain the smartness for these questions and answers:

• Radio Buttons – a list container for Radio Button Item shapes
• Check Boxes – a list container for Check Box Item shapes
• Radio Button Item – can only be contained in the Radio Buttons list shape
• Check Box Item – can only be contained in the Check Boxes list shape

Whenever a Radio Buttons or Check Boxes master is dragged and dropped onto the page, then three items will be added automatically. More can be added or removed using the right-mouse menu options Insert “xxx” Before or Insert “xxx” After, or simply by selecting an item then duplicating using CTRL+D. Another method is to drag and drop an item from the stencil, however they will only be inserted in the relevant type of list container.

The list container also have a right-mouse menu option, Locked, that can prevent any more rows from being added, or existing ones from being deleted. The list container contains formulas that works for upto 6 items because I don’t recommend more than that as possible answer options.

Display Marks can be toggled from the right-mouse menu of the list containers or in the Shape Data panel of the page.

Normally a list container does not know anything about the items within it, except for the count ( see LISMEMBERCOUNT() ). However, I have added formulas into each item so that it pushes a reference to the Prop.Checked value of each row to the relevant User.ButtonXX row in the list container shape. This formula is triggered whenever the LISTORDER() of the item shape changes.

So, now I can update the Shape Data of either a Radio Buttons or Check Boxes shape with Questions, expected Answers, an Explanation and a More Info hyperlink.

The Visio document discussed in this article can be viewed and downloaded from here.

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