Absolute References between Visio Pages

[Leslie Coover]

On several pages of Visio 2002 I have forms that I use to produce semester
office hours (door schedules) for faculty members. Each form is printed and
posted on each faculty member's office door. I would like to "link" the
information entered on each form to a form on another page that shows a
synopsis of the schedules for all faculty members. Is there a way to link
each cell on each individual form to the "synopsis" form so that each
semester I only have to change each door schedule and the overall schedule
will be automatically updated?

Les

 

[Al Edlund]

as a suggestion from the side, what you might consider investigating is
using the database wizard and linking between visio and an excel
spreadsheet.
al

 

[Leslie Coover]

Thanks for the suggestion, this would probably work but I would rather keep
everything in Visio. Suppose we have three text boxes on three different
Visio pages. Isn't there a way to link the contents of the 3 text boxes so
that ALL 3 boxes appear on page 4 and the data changes when it is changed on
page 1, 2 or 3?
This is not a big issue, I have about 8 different faculty members that I
keep schedules for. What I do at present is make updates for each faculty
member on pre-designed Visio forms (on pages 1, 2, 3 etc.) and then copy and
paste each form into a synopsis page for the complete schedule.

I have used Excel to do this in the past but because schedules change, (e.g.
one semester a faculty member might have 3 courses on Tuesday and the next
semester nothing on Tuesday but 4 classes on Wednesday) its easier to use
Visio pre-designed forms. Then when I print the page I can easily cut the
door schedule out and it fits right into the Plexiglas holder on the faculty
member's door. Using Excel I had to constantly redesign, reprint etc so the
form would be the right size.

I guess I could use Word to do this but I really like Visio because the
flexibility of the Visio form makes it easy to make changes yet keep the
total size of the form the same.

 

[Al Edlund]

As a suggestion, allowing any change on three different sources to override
your summary/master might cause a little confusion (two of the other boxes
shapes might be different since the last change over writes the table
entry). I'd probably start from the other end and put the data into the
summary page and have the data linked back to the detail forms.
Part of the issue is that to gain access to 'text' data you might have to
write some code.
An alternative to this would be to save your master data in a custom
property and then insert a 'text field' into the detail sheet object
pointing back to the master copy (Pages[Page-4]!Shape.2!prop.owner).
The example shows the formula for text field pointing back to "Page-4",
shape "Shape.2", and the custom property of "Owner"
al