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Creating PolyLines From Existing Shapes in Visio

A couple of posts in the Visio newsgroups got me thinking this weekend.  One was from an Autocad conversant user who would prefer Visio to draw a continuous line between points rather than doing the normal click, hold and drag with line tool because he has tendonitis; and the other wanted to draw a circle centered on a vertex because he is drawing land boundaries.

Visio has a PolyLine line type, but, as far as I am aware, it can only be created in code – there is no menu or toolbar button to enable you to use it.  It was introduced for converting CAD lines, and is simply a series of X and Y co-ordinates in a single cell, rather than the normal co-ordinate per row.
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Finding a Row in a Visio DataRecordset

A recent newsgroup post asked how to find a row in a Visio DataRecordset for a given criteria.  Well, I have used the IT Asset Management sample in Visio 2007 Professional to demonstrate how this can be done with a VBA function.

Of course, you may wish to improve the user interface because I limited myself to using an InputBox, and I have assumed that there is only one column defining the primary key of the DataRecordset.

The sub function, FindRow, listed below first checks whether the External Data window is open, and then gets the active DataRecordset.  The code then reads the columns of the DataRecordset and prompts for a selection of the number of the column that you wish to search for a value in.

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Displaying Document Fonts

There have been some posts recently about fonts may not displaying correctly in Visio, the Viewer, or in exports to PDF or XPS.  So, I thought it would be good to be have a bit of code that enables you to see all of the different fonts on a Visio page.  You can then use it to select a font, or to check how they are seen in different formats.

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Toggling Layers On and Off

UPDATE March 2017 : I have now expanded this functionality into an add-in for Visio (see Layer Manager add-in for Visio released ).

Visio layering system is more complex than any CAD system I’ve worked with, and often catches users out.  A Visio shape can belong to no layer, one layer or multiple layers simultaneously, and a layer can be visible or invisible; printable or non-printable.  In fact, you can have a shape on a layer that is invisible but printable – a good way to put a watermark across a document.

Firstly, Visio layers are per page in a document, and secondly, Visio layers are stored as an index number with an associated name.  Therefore, layer 1 on page 1 could be named Outline, but layer 1 on page 2 could be called something completely different!

View > Layer Properties will show you the layer settings on the active Visio page, but the # column, which gives you a count of shapes on each layer, can be misleading because the same shape can be on multiple layers, and even sub-shapes (those inside a grouped shape) are counted.

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EventXFMod can cause Visio to stop working

I was recently re-working with some old code of mine that enhanced the Cross Functional Flowchart template, and found that it can cause Visio to stop working when the VBA project is enabled. Let me explain the problem, and the solution that I have adopted.
Firstly, I should say that this is VBA because it is for occasional use only, otherwise I would go to the trouble of making an add-in.
I modified the Flowchart shapes master by entering a formula in the EventXFMode cell:
=CALLTHIS(“GetFunction”,””)
This caused the GetFunction sub to be called whenever the shape was moved (in this case to detect the Functional band that it lay within).
This was working fine until the number of pages and shapes increased, and what I found was that, although it continued to work whilst the document was open, it caused Visio to stop working when the document was opened and the VBA project enabled. This always occurred whilst Visio was busy processing all of the shapes. It seems that my GetFunction sub was conflicting with whatever the Microsoft Cross Functional add-on and the Visio routing engine was up to.
I decided that the simplest solution would be find a way of filtering the firing of my GetFunction sub, and the easiest way to do this was to add a User-defined cell in the document, called MonitorShapes, and to only call my sub if the value in that cell is not zero, by using the modified formula in the EventXFMod cell:
=IF(TheDoc!User.MonitorShapes,CALLTHIS(“GetFunction”,””),0)
Of course, I then need sub to set this value to 0 or 1.
Public Sub StartMonitorShapes()

    If ThisDocument.DocumentSheet.CellExists("User.MonitorShapes", Visio.visExistsAnywhere) Then

        ThisDocument.DocumentSheet.Cells("User.MonitorShapes").Formula = "1"

    End If

End Sub

Public Sub StopMonitorShapes()

    If ThisDocument.DocumentSheet.CellExists("User.MonitorShapes", Visio.visExistsAnywhere) Then

        ThisDocument.DocumentSheet.Cells("User.MonitorShapes").Formula = "0"

    End If

End Sub
The result is that Visio no longer stops working when I open the document, as long as I remember to run StopMonitorShapes before I save and close it.