Visio Guy

Visio Discussions => General Visio => Topic started by: jskso on October 27, 2010, 10:26:27 PM

Title: Link Visio Text Box To Single Excel Cell
Post by: jskso on October 27, 2010, 10:26:27 PM
Is it possible to link a text box in Visio to a single cell in Excel?  I have generated a diagram that I need to link several text box's to single cells (different for each text box) in Excel.  I would then like the data in the Vision text box's to update when the data in Excel is changed.  Is this possible?
Title: Re: Link Visio Text Box To Single Excel Cell
Post by: Jumpy on October 28, 2010, 07:47:08 AM
What Version of Visio do u use? Standard or Professional?
Title: Re: Link Visio Text Box To Single Excel Cell
Post by: jskso on October 28, 2010, 12:53:53 PM
Visio 2007 Professional and Microsoft Office 2007 Professional.
Title: Re: Link Visio Text Box To Single Excel Cell
Post by: Jumpy on October 28, 2010, 09:31:23 PM
Ok, then you can maybe make life easy for you:

With Visio Professional you get the Data Link feature, so that you can link ShapeData to for example Excel-Sheets.
You could use this to create a (invisible) shape, that contains one ShapeData entry for each textbox you later need.
So every Textbox looks in the right ShapeData cell for it's value/text and displays that text.

The ShapeData of the invisible shape so, is linked to excel with the External-Data-Link feature. When you change sth. in excel, u need only update the link. That updates the ShapeData and that again updates the textboxes.

Only thing to look at in Excel is that all the Data is in one Row.

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The other possibillity is that each textbox itself has (only) one ShapeData entry and displays the value of that entry as text. But now every Textbox-shape has to be linked. And in Excel all the Data has now to be in one Column. Could be the simpler solution.

Look up the Data-Link feature and decide for yourself...