ShapeSheet Formulas

Published on July 25, 2008 by David Parker

Hyperlinks to SharePoint Lists from Visio Shapes

My previous post showed how to link Visio Timelines to a SharePoint Calendar ( http://bvisual.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!3350D61BC93733A9!552.entry ), and I glibbly mentioned how you can create hyperlinks automatically on the shapes from the SharePoint list. Well, that was true, but the example shown goes to a SharePoint page, and it didn’t work. So, I feel I need to demonstrate a fix for it.

Published on July 13, 2008 by David Parker

Flags of the World

I was recently asked how to add a country flag to Visio Org Chart shapes automatically. Well, as I am currently working with world data at the moment, I have taken up the challenge. Firstly, the CIA have an excellent source of information, called the World Factbook ( https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/ ). You can find all sorts of information about every country in the world, including, of course, their flags. There are over 240 countries at the moment, and there are various codes used by different systems to identify them. Even the name may not be the same, for example, do I live in UK, United Kingdom, Great Britain, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland or just plain old England? Answers on a post card, please, addressed to …..?

Alternatively, a country can be identified accurately with a code, but you need to know which system is being used. United Kingdom can be identified by GB in the Iso 2 character system, or 826 in the Iso numeric system, or UK in the FIPS 10 system. The CIA World Factbook utilises the FIPS 10 code, so consequently, all of the country related web pages and images are coded with this system.

I have already created an Access database with all this information, so I decided to use this knowledge to create a Flags of the World Visio Master.

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Published on December 10, 2007 by David Parker

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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Published on November 15, 2007 by David Parker

Importing Hyperlinks into Visio Shapes

Visio shapes can have multiple hyperlinks, but it can be a chore to add them with the Insert / Hyperlinks … command. Fortunately, Visio 2007 Professional has the Data / Link Data to Shapes … command.

If you were to have a data source, such as an Excel spreadsheet, that contains hyperlinks (see the example below)…

Published on November 5, 2007 by David Parker

A Working Visio Clock

A recent newsgroup post asked about the ShapeSheet programming of lines in Visio to represent the hands of a clock. Well, it made me think, so here is my solution of a clock in Visio with just the ShapeSheet, and, for good measure, you can set it to refresh every minute!

Published on June 18, 2007 by David Parker

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.