John Goldsmith's visLog

Visio, Excel and late binding enumerations

Excel MVP, Mike Alexander, has an interesting video over at DailyDoseOfExcel.com  The video covers how application-specific enumerations aren’t recognized when using late binding.

His answer to the problem is to use a list of ‘manual’ enumerations, which he includes as a download on the above post. 

I emailed Mike earlier today and he very kindly ran his magic code over the Visio help files to produce this set of Visio enumerations.  Perfect if you’re writing code from the other direction.

Changing page size for all pages

A newsgroup poster has asked how to change the page size for all pages in a document in one go.  Although there’s no way of doing this through the UI, a code based answer to the problem is fairly straight forward and I think makes a nice simple first try at VBA for anyone that hasn’t had a go…

Using the Visio Event Monitor tool

 

When I began to think about the previous post, (on automating the insertion of images into an Org Chart), I started by running the Visio Event Monitor tool while manually inserting an image using the Add-On's right click option to see the results.  Rather than squeeze all of the technical explanation into the same post, I thought add a second one to go into all of the gory details and also introduce the Event Monitor tool for anyone that hasn't come across it before...

Linking Org Chart Images

A newsgroup poster asked a question this week about how he could link images within his Org Chart data.

Under normal conditions the Org Chart addon enables you to add images on a one-by-one basis.  The Insert Picture... context menu option produces a file picker dialog that waits for the user to select an image file before continuing its process and this gets in the way of any proper programatic access...

Synchronizing page zoom 'WithEvents'

How do you synchronize the page zoom level and window view across all pages in a Visio document?  This was a recent (paraphrased) question in the newsgroups and caught my eye as an interesting problem...

Hiding Pages (with VBA)

This post is a continuation of a previous one on how you might go about hiding pages within the Visio UI.  While the previous post offered a possible ShapeSheet only approach, today I'm going to look at the problem from a code perspective...

Looping through

Following on from my previous post, in which I covered some ShapeSheet and VBA basics, today I'm going to look at some simple looping programming methods that do something a little more practical.

There are many situations where you'll need to run through all of the shapes on a page to carry out an operation.  This might be in order to check each shape to see if it meets a particular criteria, (for example, only shapes based on a particular master) or perhaps to change a value in every single shape (maybe to change a base URL)...

Just for starters

So, this being the first proper post, I'm going to kick things off with a look at some of the basics of how to get at both the ShapeSheet and the VBA programming environment so that I can refer people back to this in future posts if required.

This is by no means a full course; it's intended to be a quick run through of the key elements for anyone who's not tried any ShapeSheet or VBA development before.