Visio

[Shae Clarke]

I am currently working in Visio standard. I ahve about 600 process flow
diagrams that have been created, and now need to try and extract information.
is it possible to create a macro(or something simalar that will tell me if
there is certain information on the diagram.

I would like to know if I can extract the header name all org/roles shown on
that sheet and if there are any shapes that are on that role.

any help on this would be very much appriciated.

 

[John Marshall, MVP]

You can use VBA to read the shapes and their information. Whether the
information is useful depends on how the diagram was structured. If custom
properties were used, it would be easy to relate a specific property type
with a certain shape. If the information is pure text, it may take some
extra work to obtain relevant information.

For example if a shape contians three lines of text (name, title and phone
#) it would be hard to determine phone # is this pattern is not consistent.

John... Visio MVP

Need stencils or ideas? http://www.mvps.org/visio/3rdparty.htm
Need VBA examples? http://www.mvps.org/visio/VBA.htm
Common Visio Questions http://www.mvps.org/visio/common_questions.htm

 

[Shae]

Hello John,

Thank you for answering my question.

Just so that I am clear in my understanding.
I have a process flow diagram with 10 different shapes on, I would like to
search for 3 of these shapes
1. Header
2. Org /Role (swim lane)
3. Transactions

What i then want to do is search for the 3 pieces of information on the
diagram so that I can put this information on to a spread sheet showing.
Header - org/Role - Transactions
But also showing the relationship i.e
This diagram has this header and this diagram has these org/role(swim lane)
and on this swim lane there are these transactions.

Are you saying that i could search for these in the way that I would like or
are you saying that i could search for these as individuals shapes.

Sorry to be a pain but if it is possible then I will continue to try and
work on the VBA but if I have to do something else to the diaigrams first
then at least I will have a clearer starting point.

Thanks again for your help

Shae

 

[Mark Nelson [MS]]

You can probably get all the information you want using Visio's Reporting
feature.

Go to Tools > Reports, select the Flowchart report and click Run. Choose an
output format and click OK. This will give you a report of all the
flowchart shapes, including the text on the shape and any custom properties
that have been entered.

You also mention Header and Role, which I assume refers to the headings at
the top of a swim lane diagram and the headings for each swim lane. These
are excluded from the report by default, but you can modify the report to
include these shapes too.

Go to Tools > Reports, select the Flowchart report and click Modify. This
opens the Report Definition Wizard. Click Advanced. This dialog lets you
filter out shapes from the report. Click the Clear button to remove the
existing criteria and click OK. Then click Next a few times to go to the
last dialog in the wizard. At this point you can enter a new name and
description for your report. Also you need to choose whether to store the
new report definition in the current document or a separate file. Since you
said you have multiple drawings to get information from, you should store
the definition in a separate file. Click Finish to complete your Report.
Then click Run to generate a report.