I have a 3 lane cross functional flow. This is a little different than most however. It is landscaped with only the top band being the process flow and the other two bands are text fields. The middle band indicates the screen the user is on and is only a few inches high. The bottom lane is for a detailed description and takes up 2/3 of the document. First, I had a heck of a time making the two lanes text fields...I had to drag 10 vertical grid lines on my cross functional diagram, then drop in text boxes, one for each box on the middle row and another for the bottom row as they were different sizes. This was more time consuming than it should have been, but now that I have it, I felt I'll use it as a template.
Now to my real problem. I completed the diagram (flow, screen indicated, and detailed description of task) and saved it (2007) and closed Visio. When I open it now in Visio 2007, the shapes from the flow on the top swim lane are on top of the text! So band 1 and 3 are overlayed on top of each other and at the bottom of the page and the top band that was the flow is empty! This must be some sort of Visio bug as it was not like that when i saved it, but perhaps it's due to the way I had to create the text fields? Fortunately, I had emailed the finished document and surprisingly it is emailed correctly and I can print it from the email and it's correct. But if I open the emailed document and save it as a new name, the same mix up between bands occurs once i open the document in Visio. As I have the hard copy, I will be able to "fix" the document, however, I don't want to do this if it will keep screwing up the columns each time I save it. Help! I am working on MS Office 2007 and Visio 2007. Thanks for any explanation or help!
The shapes you put into which row shouldn't matter (within reason!) and text boxes are shapes just like any others. (I'm assuming here that you do mean text boxes rather than text fields as text fields are something different entirely).
Can you post the Visio file here (add it as an attachment in the Additional Options)
FWIW you are not alone. I have the same issue when copying a flow into a new page.