Managing Thousands of Shapes

[David_H]

I find the built in method of browsing through shapes very limited.  Are there any methods that any of you power users have come up with for browsing through huge collections of shapes?  Here is what I am envisioning.  I use photo management software that allows me to organize, view and search through my photo collection based on a huge number of criteria.  I can also (gasp) clearly see a photo as I am scanning through them without having to laboriously first open a stencil only to find it doesn't have what I want in it, or find it does have what I want in it but can't easily see it because everything is so small.  I'd like something similar to my photo management software for browsing through stencils and shapes.  Does any such beat exist?  What are your workarounds for this?

Thanks!

[Yacine]

hi David,
you seem to be looking for a super search tool, which, if you consider the number and lenght of the posts related to this topic, does not exist.

Nevertheless, it sounds feasable.

I could imagine the following:
- a macro would search all the VSS of your drives,
- open them and read the custom properties of every shape
- you would then store these data in a relational data base (eg access) and offer them as search tags to the user.
- regarding the preview, you could make  a wmf or png of every shape in every stencil, save them in a separate directory and link them to the shape entries in your DB.

A matter of 2-3 days of work.

[Paul Herber]

May I take the liberty of pointing you at my
http://www.sandrila.co.uk/visio-utilities/
which has a free stencil display utility.

[David_H]

Thanks both of you.

Paul, would you elaborate a little on what your stencil display utility does?  How does it assist with my dilemma?  How is it different than just opening up stencils with Visio?  Also, you said it's free, but it's $50, right (assuming I don't want to wait 500 seconds after I have used it 500 times )?  I'm fine with that if it makes my life easier.

[Paul Herber]

Sure. The utilities offer many functions, some of which are completely free, if all you want to use are the free features then the utilities work just as free software. If you use any of the non-free features then a dialog box appears and you have to click the OK button to continue.

Here's an example:

[David_H]

Awesome, I will give your utilities a try, thank you.