Dynamic Shapes

[Steve Larson]

What is the best way to have a shape dynamically change (between ~20 images)
based on a data value in an excel spreadsheet? Think of this as a dashboard
with milestone images representing the status for various shapes on the
dashboard.



I looked at creating a small dot as the shape and using custom icon-sets to
pick the correct shape. I looked at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa468596.aspx and saw how to use
custom icon-sets up to 5 (or even 6) icons. That does not support the ~20
shapes I need to select from. Nothing else there seemed to stand out as an
option.



The positions need to be maintained (as in a map) so generating the diagram
programmatically does not look like a good option.



I did a search and did not find anything that I could make into a solution
either.



Steve

 

[Chris Roth [Visio MVP]]

If you are using images, then the "filmstrip" pattern works well, as Paul
alluded to.

I've got an article that explains the process and has some links to some
tools as well:

Visio Film Strip Shapes: Hurray for Hollywood!

http://www.visguy.com/2007/09/25/visio-film-strip-shapes-hurray-for-hollywood/

--

Hope this helps,

Chris Roth
Visio MVP

For in-depth Visio articles, Visio tutorials and free Visio shapes, stencils
and templates, check out my web site:

Visio Guy
http://www.visguy.com

For more Visio discussion, visit our forum (complete with pictures and
downloads!):

Visio Guy Forum
http://www.visguy.com/vgforum

 

[Steve Larson]

[My previous reply went directly to Chris. Sorry about that.]

I got it to work using the links to the articles. Thank you. I have
another question. Is there a way to replace the filmstrip artwork for the
image without recreating everything? I tried doing things like mentioned at
the end of
http://www.visguy.com/2007/09/25/visio-film-strip-shapes-hurray-for-hollywood,
but kept losing the shape info.



For others, I needed to do some workarounds (possibly due to things I missed
being I am new to this) so I thought I would share them.



When I tried to save the filmstrip to a .png file, I got an error 920 during
the action save as. This is because of the page size defaults to 5000+ by
950+ inches unless I use a custom size in the save as dialog even when the
drawing size is set to the size of the filmstrip. This occurs in 2007 as
well as 2010 beta. The KB article mentions only 2002 and that a Service
Release should solve the issue (I asked them to update the article). I got
past this by setting the custom size.



I then had a problem with the saved file only containing the first image in
the filmstrip. Although there should be no information in the file that
says what size an individual image is. I could not get it to save the
entire strip from Visio. When I adjusted the custom size, the single
"frame" just stretched. I ended up doing a print screen => Paint => .png
file. This produced low resolution images which I would like to fix at some
point, but it was enough to get things working.



I had a problem getting the filmstrip to index as I thought it should so I
looked at the formulas and found that the ImgOffsetX would always =0 when
User.pane=0 as mentioned in
http://www.visguy.com/2007/09/25/visio-film-strip-shapes-hurray-for-hollywood.
Changing the User-defined Cell User.pane to User.index fixed it.



Steve