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Metric vs US Units in Visio floor plans

First of all, as a Brit, I have to point out that US Units in Visio should really be called Imperial Units 🙂 I was born pre-decimalisation (note the s not a z!) and have had a mixed vocabulary ever since. I think about distances in feet, yards and miles not in millimetres, metres and kilometres. I weigh myself in stones and pounds, not kilograms.
As a trained (but lapsed) building architect, I can convert between metric and imperial lengths and areas fairly well, and have got used to changing glibly between both systems. I used to draw on Imperial size paper (wonderfully called Double Elephant), and spend many hours folding freshly printed, but dangerously smelling, dyelines. Imperial/US Units paper sizes are not all the same ratio between the side lengths like Metric paper sizes are. So, this creates a problem with Visio…


All of the setup of printer and page size, orientation and scale are selected in the Page Setup dialog, but all of the Visio templates come with some optons already set.

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Automating Area and Perimeter Length Shape Data

[UPDATE: Microsoft introduced a new function into Visio 2010 called PATHLENGTH(…), so some of the following is now not required. See Automatic Line and Segment Lengths in Visio )

Another newsgroup question has asked about automating the update of shape area and perimeter lengths.  Now, this is an area (no pun intended) that I am most interested in because I used to do a lot of space planning.  Visio Professional does include Space and Boundary shapes on the Resources stencil that use an add-in to update the area, but does nothing about the perimeter length.  These shapes do highlight some of the issues to be considered though…

  • Visio pages can be scaled, and indeed the various floor plan and site layout templates in Visio are pre-scaled.  Most templates are not scaled, and  therefore default to 1:1 scale.
  • Visio measures everything internally in inches, although you can display in almost whatever units you choose.
  • The Visio Application object has a handy ConvertResult (StringOrNumber, UnitsIn, UnitsOut) method, which can be used for linear and area measurements … and can also be used for date and times.
  • Visio can store decimal numbers to a very high degree of precision (I counted 14 decimal places), but you almost always want to format the display.
  • Visio can call a method in a VBA project when the values in specified cells are changed.
  • It is easy to display Shape Data in a shape, either by using Data Graphics or by Insert Field

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