Aggrevating VISIO Help

[Philip J. Mayo]

Is there any way to get online/offline help in VISIO without going insane? I have yet to search on a subject and get anything remotely helpful. If I don't get dozens of unrelated topics, I get a help page that is starved of information

I use VBA help quite a lot while programming and there is an awesome amount of helpful detail, samples, and references to other objects and functions. I bring up help on a ShapeSheet function and I am stunned and frustrated by the sparse information provided

Help is decent for the GUI, and help for templates and stencils is almost overwhelming, but any help having to do with the shapesheets and automation is almost worse than no help at all

Now I may be overreacting. I have a bad habit of not reading through all the references and guides, so I may have missed something. I only recently found a way to list the references to shapesheet functions (searching almost never works to find a shapesheet function without the actual name) but there is still no breakdown by type or use

If anyone can lead me in the right direction or recommend a book that may fill the gap, please let me know. Many of the things I wish to do in VISIO are unique and much of the included templates and stencils do not apply to my needs. My main focus is making custom automated shapes, so I am doing a lot of shapesheet manipulation and some VBA coding

Thanks
Phil

 

[Heidi Munson [MSFT]]

Download the Visio 2003 SDK. Its documentation is more searchable than the
Visio product documentation especially if you're interested in developer
features. The primary SDK documentation includes the Automation reference,
ShapeSheet reference, XML reference, Save as Web reference and articles.
Documentation for tools and most samples are separate.

For building shapes, check out the ShapeStudio tool in the Visio 2003 SDK.
It provides a UI for specifying, creating, building, maintaining and testing
shapes. ShapeStudio defines a number of common shape developer tasks as
shape behaviors which it can apply to masters you define in the tool.
Behaviors usually involve multiple cells. Examples of pre-defined Behaviors
are Primary Text which defines how text is configured for the shape and
Size/Resize which defines if and how a shape is constrained as well as it
initial size.

Developing Microsoft Visio Solutions is also useful; it has some good
discussions on creating shapes. Unfortunately this wasn't updated for Visio
2003 but the 2002 version is still relevant. Its available on MSDN. Here a
link to the online version,
http://msdn.microsoft.com/nhp/Default.asp?contentid=28000456&frame=true. It
was included in the Visio 2002 SDK's documentation and is easily searchable
there.

The following page has links to download both SDKs,
http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/downloads/sdks/default.aspx

-Heidi
Microsoft Corporation

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Is there any way to get online/offline help in VISIO without going insane?

I have yet to search on a subject and get anything remotely helpful. If I
don't get dozens of unrelated topics, I get a help page that is starved of
information.

I use VBA help quite a lot while programming and there is an awesome

amount of helpful detail, samples, and references to other objects and
functions. I bring up help on a ShapeSheet function and I am stunned and
frustrated by the sparse information provided.

Help is decent for the GUI, and help for templates and stencils is almost

overwhelming, but any help having to do with the shapesheets and automation
is almost worse than no help at all.

Now I may be overreacting. I have a bad habit of not reading through all

the references and guides, so I may have missed something. I only recently
found a way to list the references to shapesheet functions (searching almost
never works to find a shapesheet function without the actual name) but there
is still no breakdown by type or use.

If anyone can lead me in the right direction or recommend a book that may

fill the gap, please let me know. Many of the things I wish to do in VISIO
are unique and much of the included templates and stencils do not apply to
my needs. My main focus is making custom automated shapes, so I am doing a
lot of shapesheet manipulation and some VBA coding.