Toolbar Changes and Custom Toolbars do not persist between session

[Jim in Florida]

Running Visio 2003 under WinXP SP2. When I create a custom toolbar or
add/change an existing toolbar (e.g. adding "Increase font size" button to
Formatting toolbar), there is no trace of the toolbars after I close Visio
and re-run it. Where is this information stored, and why do the custom
changes not seem persistant from run to run? The custom toolbar that I
created (View, Toolbars, New..., etc.) does not appear in the list for me to
check the next time, and any changes to the toolbars do not persist. This is
MOST annoying!

 

[JohnM]

YES! This is a very bad bug.

I make custom toolbars and buttons all the time for MS-Word. I know they are
stored in normal.dot template, and I know how to move them to other
templates. But alas, Visio-2003 does not work so smoothly as MS-Word!!

Make a custom toolbar in Visio, and it works until a reboot. Then poof--its
gone, nowhere to be found. It is not in the View-Toolbars "pick-list."

I have not been able to get any response about this from MSFT.


Here is a poor workaround methodology.

1. Open a .vsd (Like MASTER_TOOLS.VSD) -- and make sure it is a template you
can use for all future work.

2. Right-click on a toolbar and go to the bottom of the pop-up and pick
"Customize" and add and fill all your custom toolbars. Test eveything and
make sure you are happy with everything.

3. Go back to the "Customize" dialog box and click-"Attach"

4. In the "Attach Toolbars" dialog box, you can Copy your custom toolbars to
the active file--(MASTER_TOOLS.VSD if you used this filename from step 1)

5. Save this file, and back it up.

As far as I can tell, the only place all your hard work on customized
toolbars is stored is here! You CANNOT move them to any other file. You
CANNOT move them into some default store.

6. When you want to start a new document, copy and rename the copy to
whatever you want the new file's name to be. Now you have your custom
toolbars.

7. If you want to "update" a toolbar, you can't. You have to create a new
toolbar(located somewhere in the main Viso app where Visio looses it), copy
all the buttons from the old toolbar (in the local file), over to the new
toolbar, add all the updates to the new toolbar. Test it and make sure you
are happy with it, and then "attach" it to the local file. Then delete the
old toolbar from the local file. Make sure to save this file and make it the
new MASTER-TOOLS.

Very frustrating...

Can someone at Microsoft answer this:

What must I do to (a) create a toolbar environment like I can in MS-Word,
(b) share my toolbar environment with others, and (c) restore that
environment when I have to rebuild my system and re-install everything?

 

[Mark Nelson [MS]]

What version of Adobe Acrobat do you have installed? Several people have
reported that 6.0 causes problems with Visio commandbars.

--
Mark Nelson
Office Graphics - Visio
Microsoft Corporation

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

 

[Jim in Florida]

Thanks to JohnM for the kludge-around. I am doing something like that now-
very frustrating.

Mark-

I have Acrobat Pro 7.0.8 installed. It did insert its toolbars into Visio.
(I have never used them.) Do you have an idea of where the problem
arises? Do you know if the toolbar persistance works pre-Acrobat install?

Thanks,

-Jim

 

[JohnM]

Mark,

MANY THANKS for looking into this!!

I am running adobe 7.08.

Somehow they manage to put in a custom toolbar in the default application--I
wish I could....

I don't recall the behavior changing before and after the installation of
Adobe. I think it did the same thing befoe I installed adobe.

I hope you'll be able to figure out something! :>)

 

[Rich]

Well... its been over two years since MS has responded with another question,
but no answer that I can see. Has this issue been resolved?. I am using Visio
2007 with Adobe 7.1.0 Professional. This is still... very frustrating.

 

[visiSteve]

Well... its been over two years since MS has responded with another question,
but no answer that I can see. Has this issue been resolved?. I am using Visio
2007 with Adobe 7.1.0 Professional. This is still... very frustrating.











- Show quoted text -

I can take a crack at this...

Visio has two different methods for allowing developers to add custom
menus & toolbars. The old way is something called UIObject, and the
new way is called CommandBars. Both methods have some bugs and
conflicts with each other, and customizations that are being made
through automation (like from the Adobe plugin) can sometimes conflict
with customizations that the end user creates. In order to
troubleshoot the issue, you can disable the Adobe Visio plugin to see
if it's the source of the problem by doing this:

1. Close Visio if it's running.
2. Run regedit (Start...Run, type "regedit" and hit OK).
3. Navigate to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Visio\Addins
node.
4. You should see an entry called PDFMVisio.PDFMVisioCOMAddin.
Select that, then double-click on LoadBehavior on the right.
4. Change the LoadBehavior value to 0. This will prevent the Adobe
addin from launching the next time you start Visio. You can re-enable
it again by changing this value to 3 after you're done testing, or
just leave it at 0 if you never use it anyway.
5. Start Visio and add your custom toolbar. Close Visio and see if
it's still there. If it is, then it's the Adobe plugin that is
causing the problem. As Mark mentioned this is something that's been
seen before especially with the Adobe plugin.


Good luck...