Stephen’s Scribble Pad

By Stephen 　http://smmeyer.com/scribble/?p=45

The consultants I work for are always needing process flow diagrams and so I use Visio a lot. However my efforts to boost productivity by customizing the interface have always been frustrated because, try as I might, I couldn’t get Visio to retain any of my changes to the toolbar from one drawing to the next. It appeared at the time that these changes (as well as any macros I might have recorded) could only be saved in the actual drawing file currently open and would thus vanish as soon as I started a new drawing. Unlike Word and Excel which have the Normal document and Personal workbook templates respectively, Visio has no such thing. Visio also cannot create custom buttons so you can only assign shortcut keys to run your macro.

By chance I made an amazing discovery (second best this week). Open Visio without a drawing page, change your toolbar buttons as desired and close Visio. Then when you open it again all your tool changes are still there, and they stay there no matter how many different drawings you work on. Super!

One trick I’ve always wanted to automate was resizing the printed page to fit the drawing contents so that drawings embedded as objects in Word documents would be correctly framed within the boundary of the object and not zoomed to a portion of the drawing only. This usually requires navigating in Visio through File/Page Setup/Page Size tab and checking the Size to fit drawing contents option. The best thing I’ve learned this week was that macros can be stored in Stencil files too. I nearly always use the Basic Flowchart (Metric) stencil (a.k.a. BASFLO_M.VSS) so I created my “fix my page” macro in this stencil so it will be available for 99% of my work. Of course the stencils are opened as Read Only so you need to save it under another name and then, after closing Visio, rename the original stencil as a .bkp file and rename your new stencil to replace the original one i.e. BASFLO_M.VSS.

B.t.w. the stencils are found in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Visio**\1033