Visio 2003 File Size Limits?

[CarlM]

Hi,
Is there any limits to how big a Visio 2003 file can be before it starts
behaving badly? We have a client that has a 15MB file that he is having
issues with. I searched google and msdn and found nothing.

Thanks,

Carl

 

[Chris Roth [Visio MVP]]

Hi Carl,

Does it seem like the drawing should be 15MB, or does that strike you as
too large for what is in the drawing?

Visio has a "feature" where by master shapes dragged into a drawing
bring a copy into the document's local stencil, called the Document Stencil.

The problem is, the local masters don't get deleted when shapes on the
page get deleted.

So a Visio doc can balloon in size if the user has tried lots of
masters, then decided he didn't want them any more (ie: drag, drop,
hmmmm, delete -- the Document Stencil gets full of unused masters)

Visio 2007 has a feature for cleaning up these unused masters. With
Visio 2003, it's a bit more tricky.

Have a look under File > Shapes > Show Document Stencil and see if there
are tons of masters first...


--
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

 

[vojo]

I have not found a hard wall. I have shape stencils on the order of 5MB and
have done drawings on the order of 20MB. I will say that if the drawing
gets too big (say a couple of MB) it becomes difficult to copy into PPT or
word....usually have to paste special as a enhanced metafile picture.

I did go crazy just once and copied into PPT natively...got to 70MB before I
decided to stop. PPT worked on a laptop with 2G of memory...but took about
5 minutes for each paste.

 

[CarlM]

Hi Chris,
Oops, I mistakenly replied by email last time. We tend to use a lot of
groups in our shape construction, but that is due to our shapes being
generated automatically via an icon construction program. I'll go with your
assesment that it doesn't seem 'that large' and not panic. I will still
follow up on this and if I find out anything worthwhile, I'll report back.

Thanks for the feedback everyone.
Carl