Hi,
As with many questions here, you can do what you ask with code. Since
I don't know how experienced you are as a programmer, you may want to
try a technique with Data Linking in Visio 2007 Pro. If you are using
an earlier version of Visio, or Visio 2007 Standard, this won't work
so you can stop here. If you are using Visio 2007 Pro, I'll outline a
general method but it still assumes that you know something about Data
Linking, Shape Data, and the ShapeSheet.
- Create a mater shape to have Shape Data values corresponding to the
width, height, (and location PinX, PinY?) and also the formatting
values that you specified
- The master should also have a Shape Data value to be used for a
unique ID
- In this master, use formulas in the ShapeSheet so that the Shape
Transform and Format cells equal the values in the corresponding Shape
Data cells
- Drop the master to create as many instances on the page that you
need
- Fill in the unique ID for each shape; these should correspond to a
unique ID column in your spreadsheet
- Open the External Data Window in Visio and link the Visio drawing to
the spreadsheet as a Data Source
- Use auto-linking to link the shapes in the drawing to the
corresponding records
- If you've set up your formulae correctly, the shapes in the page
should update in size, position, color, etc as per the linked data
- When you change the Excel data, refresh the data in Visio and the
shapes should change accordingly
The reason I suggest using Shape Data here is to leverage a built-in
feature of Data Linking to update Shape Data based on linked external
data. We would do it quite differently with a custom program but this
may get you what you need.
Brett
