Just when we thought the pandemic was coming to an end, another variant appears to scupper our plans. So, resuming in-person events is delayed, and the world isn’t safe until the world is immunised. Therefore, I decided to make the presentations that I was going to be presenting on the abandoned Microsoft Ignite The Tour last year available, although I did manage to go to London and Copenhagen before we all stopped flying around the globe…
There are literally thousands of master shapes in the stencils supplied with Microsoft Visio, so I guess that mistakes can creep in. One error that I have noticed is the inability of the default text control handle of many of the network shapes to actually move the text block horizontally.
I have only been developing Visio solutions for 25 years, but I got a surprise this week when I was trying to understand why I couldn’t update the value of a Shape Data row of multiple selected shapes. It is something that I often do, so it took me a while to understand why I was failing to change the values, even though it appeared to initially change in the Shape Data window. There was no problem selecting the shapes individually, but every time I selected multiple shapes and edited these particular rows, I could see the new value in the Shape Data window, but as soon as I looked at the individual shapes, I could see that the values never got changed. I checked my code in vain, and ran the Events Monitor from the Visio SDK. Visio seemed to enter the Shape Data scope, but then immediately exited it without attempting to apply the new value to the shapes. Very strange!
I wrote a Visio add-in a few years ago that provides the ability to switch a multi-page Visio diagram between alternative languages. This particular client had just under a hundred pages of process flowcharts, with hyperlinks between the pages. They had to produce this Visio document in seven different languages and got extremely fed-up with trying to synchronise all the different copies whenever any changes were made, so a single Visio document which can store all of the alterative shape texts and page names was a much simpler time saving-solution. Moreover, Microsoft provide an online cognitive service which is useful for automatic speedy translations, though these can be overridden by a more knowledgeable user.
However, since this add-in was written, Microsoft have changed this translation service, and Visio has introduced 64bit version as the default. Therefore, I have updated the Multi-Language Text for Visio add-in to support both of these, and taken the opportunity to change the installation and licensing system.
[Read more…] about Have multiple alternate languages in the same Visio diagramI have written many COM and VSTO add-ins for Visio, but got confused when a client recently reported that the following Custom UI Runtime Error was appearing. I wasn’t getting the same error on any of my test laptops, so I chatted with my good friend, and fellow Visio MVP, John Goldsmith ( John Goldsmith’s visLog (typepad.co.uk) ). He gave me an excellent tip….
There are times, in Visio, when you just need to ensure that the text in a primary shape is synchronised with the text in different secondary shapes … even if they are on different pages of a Visio document. My previous article, Forcing Display Update of Inherited Data Values , describes a method of synchronising the values in Shape Data rows from a central data source in the document, and that allows for the values to be viewed and edited in multiple pages or shapes. However, the text of a Visio shape is different because it is not stored in a single ShapeSheet cell, so how can you display the text of one shape in another?
