Copying pictures; Select shape with "None" Line & Fill

[Paul]

Background: I've found that a foolproof way to transfer Powerpoint and
Visio pictures to Word (or even to Powerpoint) is to insert a
Microsoft Word Picture, into which I paste the copied picture as an
Ehanced Metafile. This avoids rasterizing the picture, along with all
its problems, and it allows me to scale the picture object and see
both the fonts and shapes scale accordingly.

I encounter a problem when grabbing a collection of objects on a Visio
2000 sheet and pasting as an Enhanced Metafile. A strip of detail
along the top is truncated off, and along the bottom as well. I am
grabbing this collection of objects from a landscape Tabloid sheet.

Any suggestions of the cause and a workaround would be appreciated.

I've come up with a workaround that is far from perfect. The
workaround is to put a box around all the shapes that I want to copy
and paste as an Enhanced Metafile. I just make sure that the box
edges are far enough beyond the outermost objects of interest. It is
an eye-balling exercise, so trial and error (like I said, far from
perfect).

I created a problem before I fine-tuned this imperfect workaround.
The box I drew around the objects to be cut/pasted was formatted so
that both Line and Fill were None. No I can't select the box. I can
select all, then individually deselect everything else but the box,
but there are too many objects and I invariably screw up before I
finish deselecting everything else. The solution is to have white
fill and line, which I used on another sheet. However, the original
box (None for Fill and Line) cannot be selected for deletion.

How can I select and delete this box (None for Fill and Line) without
resorting to the error-prone process of Select All followed by
deselecting everything else?

 

[WapperDude]

Not sure why you have to do that. In Visio, copy the drawing, in Word, do
paste special>Visio drawing object. Retains all of the scaling features,
plus, double clicking opens the Visio drawing in Visio.

Wapperdude

 

[Chris Roth [Visio MVP]]

Hi Paul,

You want to select the box in Visio or in other apps?

You could net select everything just inside the box and move it away. By
net selecting I mean, dragging a rectangle around everything.

Also, the Drawing Explorer could help you.

1. Go to View > Drawing Explorer Window
2. Expand the tree to Foreground Pages > Page-1 > Shapes
3. Select a shape node ("Sheet.xx" for example) and press the down-arrow key

The shape that you select in the tree will be selected in the window.
You should be able to find your invisible rectangles this way.


--
Hope this helps,

Chris Roth
Visio MVP


Visio Guy: Smart Graphics for Visual People

Articles: http://www.visguy.com
Shapes: http://www.visguy.com/shapes
Dev: http://www.visguy.com/category/development/
Forum: http://www.viguy.com/vgforum

 

[Paul]

Wow. That is incredibly awesome. I picked my longer way of doing
this from problems with Powerpoint pictures transferred into word,
then powerpoint pictures transferred from larger pages to normal
pages. But for Visio, your method works fine. Thanks!

I'm still finding the tops and bottoms truncated though, when I
paste. So I have to put an oversized invisible box around all the
objects of interest on the Visio canvas. Same thing happens when I
print to PDF with PDFmaker.

 

[Paul]

That's cool. Thanks, Chris.

On an alternative note, I also found that it works to make the shape
have no fill pattern, but a white line border.