Visio

Published on November 8, 2025 by David Parker

Post-Processing Paste from Clipboard in Visio

One of my current Visio VSTO add-in projects requires me to react to users pasting custom shapes in the Visio page from the clipboard. The process involves registering the ExitScope event and then checking the Clipboard contents. Initially, I was merely testing for a line in the DataObject that started with the word “Visio “, but then testing revealed that copying and pasting text from one shape to another was also getting processed, so then I added a further check that the line also finished with the word ” Shapes”. This works fine, but then I got to wonder if I could also post-process tables copied and pasted from Excel because the standard paste maintains font settings but omits the tabs and line feeds, making the text unusable without serious manual editing. This article explains how this can done.

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Published on June 26, 2025 by David Parker

Jumping between Shapes in Visio

Many Visio diagrams get quite large, and sometimes it is useful to provide the ability to jump to another shape quickly in the same document, either on a different page or on the same one. Although there is an add-on provided in desktop Visio that is used by the Off-Page Reference shape provided in the Basic Flowcharts Shapes stencil (see my other posts), this article is about using the hyperlinks available in both the desktop and browser editions of Visio. Fortunately, Visio desktop has the ability to create hyperlinks to a specific shape by selecting the page and entering the name of the target shape. This creation ability is not available in Visio for the web, but using the desktop created ones is!

Insert Field to display shape ID and Name
Hyperlink Sub-Address
Following a hyperlink

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Published on May 19, 2025 by David Parker

Co-authoring and Commenting with Visio Documents

Microsoft Visio can be used in the web browser and on the desktop, but there are several licensing options available, so which ones can be used concurrently whilst supporting co-authoring and commenting? This article tests the various scenarios but assumes that the Visio documents are stored in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online\Teams. The Microsoft article, Work together on Visio drawings, explains most of the scenarios, but does not clearly explain the scope of the Visio web licenses with respect to diagram types or customisations.

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Published on March 28, 2025 by David Parker

Merging Linked Data from Similar Tables

I was recently asked how to link data from different tables but with similar column names to Visio shapes. In this case, each table has the same unique identifier, but some of the column names are the same. The problem is that the data linking matches the column name with the label of a Shape Data row label, so the shared columns were updated with the values from the last linked data recordset. In this article I present a simple way that this restriction can be overcome.

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Published on March 5, 2025 by David Parker

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.

In Tutor mode, the Questions, Answers, Explanation and More Info can be edited
In normal mode, the Questions are presented unmarked and without explanation
Incorrect answers are marked with a red cross. An explanation and optional more info hyperlink is available
Correct answers are marked with a green tick. An explanation and optional more info hyperlink is available.

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Published on March 1, 2025 by David Parker

Using Button Face Ids in Visio

Microsoft Visio desktop has the ability to display icons from a built-in list of Office icons on Actions and Action Tags (nee Smart Tags). These can be set in the ShapeSheet by using the desired number from several thousand in the ButtonFace cell. Although there is the ability to add better icons using code, the quick ShapeSheet formulas are useful way of indicating the purpose of a command. This article simply lists the first 3,600 of these fas a quick and easy reference for me, and othe ShapeSheet disigners out there!