Visio Guy

Hi everyone,
I'm new at Visio and I need some help. And I hope I post my question in the right place.
I use a software which manages to write inside the CustomProperty block of any Office file (Excel, Word and Visio). [What I call the CustomProperty block is the Custom tab when you right-click on the file > Properties inside the Windows Explorer]
In order to use this custom properties, with Word you have the Quickpart item, with Excel you have to name a cell... but I'm totally clueless on how to call this properties inside my Visio files.

My goal is to avoid filling information 2 times. This is the expected behaviour:

• I create my file inside a vault (SolidWorks PDM to be precise)
• I use a datacard to attach metadata to my file (if I check out the file from the vault now, the metadata don't come with the file)
• This metadata are written inside the customproperty block (if I check out the file from the vault now, the metadata comes with the file)
• When I open the document, I'm able to automatically fill some fields with this metadata (QuickPart for Word, named cells for Excel)

I would like to do the same with Visio.
I should mention that my vault software is only able to write (and read) the CustomProperty block...

Do you have any solution? This is may be impossible, I really don't know.

Thanks to everyone who will look at my problem

In Visio you can't add custom properties of document like as in Word application.

Visio document properies window have fixed fields. But you can store some field in TheDoc (Document Shapesheet™)

Surrogate is correct in that you are running into a common issue with third party applications that are aimed at "office". Visio does not use the same document property heuristics as Word and Excel so these other tools often fail when they attempt to work against Visio. One of the few remaining things that MS hasn't messed up yet.
al Edlund

Thanks for your quick answers. I understand that it shouldn't be possible but I must disagree with you:

I do have a Custom tab when I right-click on my .vsd file et I can create as many property as I want (with the name I want).

(http://www.hostingpics.net/viewer.php?id=408995Dessin1vsdCustomProperties.jpg)
(For the record, I'm using Visio 2010 and as far as I know, I performed a standard installation)

Moreover when I use my third party application, it's able to read and write inside this tab! But unable to read (or write) anything else from a vsd file...

So the solution would be to link this weird properties to something I can use inside the body of the file but when I read other posts, it seems it's not possible... (and soooo frustating)

Adrien

IMHO: You can add this custom tab use third part tool, but you can't use these fields in shapesheet™ automation! These fields are invisible in shapesheet™

That's what I was afraid of...

Well thank you a lot for your time!