Comments on Toggling Shapes in Visio: Special Deliverable #12

Chris Paddock — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:37 GMT

Oh, if someone can point me i the right direction, I can be reached at paddock@gmail.com.

Chris Paddock — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:37 GMT

I’m embarassed to as this . . . how do I create brackets? I tried to using the draw tool, but that created 8 Geometries instead of 4, couldn’t tell what was what.

brownorama — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:12 GMT

This page from the Visio reference at Microsoft.com is quite useful for understanding shape references:

http://tinyurl.com/3qcyb

Steven LeMay — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:12 GMT

This series is proving most useful Dan, thank you. I took this idea a small step further in order to use the User-defined Cell value to set various properties with an IF statement.

For example:
This statement will toggle the fill from solid to transparent
FillPattern – IF(User.IsSolid,1,0)

and this one will toggle the line colour from blue to grey
LineColor – IF(User.IsSolid,RGB,RGB)

This works perfectly for the properties of a combined shape but the limitation I quickly bumped into is that I can’t use the same User-defined Cell value across shapes in a group. I presume that there is a syntax that will allow this but I have been unable to figure it out. Any thoughts?

Dan Brown — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:12 GMT

I’ve also posted a couple “Stupid Visio Tricks” to my blog. Check ‘em out at:

http://www.greenonions.com/index.php/index.php?cat=9

Jon Ashley — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:12 GMT

Thanks for the tutorial Dan! At first I wondered while the shape wasn’t available for download, but when completing the tutorial took 5 minutes I realized why.

But the most valuable part of Visio shapes are the “connection points” that keep all the “arrows” connected to the “boxes,” and following the tutorial steps removes them.

Using the Visio stencil downloadable from jjg.net, I followed the tutorial but then added back in the connection points through the contextual menu “Insert Section > Connection points”.

The values that appear to work for the “continuation” shape are:
TOP Width*0.5 Height*1 0 in -1 in
BOTTOM Width*0.5 Height*0 0 in 1 in
LEFT Width*0 Height*0.5 1 in 0 in
RIGHT Width*1 Height*0.5 -1 in 0 in

Great stuff Dan.