bVisual Blog by David Parker

Published on February 22, 2021 by David Parker

Using the CALLTHIS function in Visio

Visio was the first non-Microsoft application to include VBA within it back in the mid-nineties. All of the desktop Microsoft Office applications currently include VBA, although Microsoft have been rumoured to want to replace it for many years, and now there is an alternative scripting option becoming available that is suitable for the web too.

Visio was acquired by Microsoft in 2000, and there are still many scenarios when it is useful to have VBA procedures available in Visio for the Desktop. These procedures can be created using the recorder, and then edited, or just created manually. Every Visio document can contain a VBA project, but it must be saved with the .vsdm extension for documents, .vssm extension for stencils, or .vstm extension for templates. The last letter, m, informs Windows that this file could contain macros, as opposed to the normal last letter x, which cannot. Even with this extension, users, or their IT department, may not enable the macros in Visio documents.

The CALLTHIS function in Visio can be used to run a procedure (sub-function) in a Visio Visual Basic document and pass through a reference to the shape that the function is called from. The Microsoft Docs provide an explanation of this useful technique, and it does describe some examples, but it does not show the VBA code that these examples need, nor does it show them working. It also does not make it clear that these procedures do not need to be in the Visio diagram document, but can be in a stencil that is open in the active Visio session. This is important because it means that VBA code can be centralised and distributed for use use on many other documents.

Using CALLTHIS with code in a document
Using CALLTHIS with code in a stencil
The VBA code behind

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Published on January 2, 2021 by David Parker

Referencing Visio Shapes

Every Visio shape must have a unique name in the collection that it belongs to, and to ensure this, Visio automatically one using the master name or just “Sheet”, if not an instance of a master, followed by a period (“.”) and the ID. However, a user can rename a shape, and Visio will then also update the universal name (NameU) to be the same as the Name. If a user chooses to re-name a shape a second time, then thee universal name is not updated … it remains as the original name.

To demonstrate this I drew a rectangle, then named, and re-named it:

Shape is automatically named
The Name and NameU are the same
The Name and NameU are initially the same
The Name U remains unchnaged when Name changed again

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Published on December 28, 2020 by David Parker

Play Backgammon with Visio

Still in lockdown on holiday, so I thought I would create a version of backgammon that can be played with Visio for the web. This was inspired by my original Visio tutor, the late David Edson, who created a Visio backgammon document which included macros. Macros are not available in Visio for the web, so I have created one where the dice can be shaken, the doubling cube changed, and the pieces reset, using nothing but ShapeSheet formulas.

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Published on December 26, 2020 by David Parker

Play Chess with Visio in Teams

Following on from my last article about playing checkers with Visio in Teams, I decided that I should also revisit my earlier Visio chessboard to make it work in Visio online. I have implemented the ability to automatically reset the positions before a new game, and I have made a single chess piece shape that can be either colour or icon.

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Published on December 25, 2020 by David Parker

Play Checkers with Visio in Teams

We are all spending more time in Teams or SharePoint nowadays, but not everyone knows that Visio documents can now be shared and collaborated with, and even set as a Teams tab. I was trying to think of a suitable demonstration of the co-working and collaboration possibilities, and came up with a reworking of an earlier post about playing checkers with Visio. Since this previous document was made before Visio for the web, I made some enhancements that work just as well with Visio for desktop and Visio for the web. This article explains a few ShapeSheet customisations that can be developed in Visio for the desktop, but can then be used in Visio for the web. Notice how each player can see which piece was moved by their opponent because their initials are displayed, and this is expanded to the full name if the mouse cursor is hovered over them.

Two players co-working in Visio for the web

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Published on November 27, 2020 by David Parker

Creating PowerPoint Presentations automatically from Visio

Visio Plan 2 has a great, but flawed, feature called Slide Snippets, that can create PowerPoint presentations automatically from any number of titled rectangles, on any number of pages in a Visio document. However, it usually creates distorted images, and it does not automatically contain any descriptive text or hyperlinks. I have previously described how the distortions can be manually fixed (see Manual Fix for Slide Snippets in Visio Plan 2 ), but that is tedious, so I have written a Visio add-in, SS Plus, to not only fix the image, but also allow hyperlinks to be added to it, and to include descriptive text that can include bold, italics and hyperlinks … and can be automatically converted into SmartArt layouts!