Visio Guy

 
I'm using Visio to do building floor plans for, fire dept. pre-fire plans.  Some of the floor plans can become pretty intricate. Usually, what I do is work on the drawing with the plan large on the desktop. Occasionally, with a large building I'll do a floor plan in sections then piece them together. Eventually I need to shrink/reduce these sections down considerable so they overall diagram with fit on a standard form that I use. I have run into a problem. When I try to select and highlight a portion of a floor plan and try to reduce it, it doesn't reduce. What happens is that the walls and doors and windows, etc literally crumbles together. It's as though the floor plans falls apart.  I've come to a standstill with some of my work and I would really appreciate anyone's help.

Could you upload an example? It sounds like a grouped Shape that comes apart, because the references are absolut and not relative or the group behavior is not correct, see under Format->Behaviour.

Yea that sounds right. Its like everything just crumbles or collapses onto itself. it's very frustrating. How do i upload an example. Thanks For your help too.

When you reply (or start new topic), at the lower left there's a "+ Additional Options...".  Click on that, it will then allow you to browse to a file and up load it.  There's a 500KB max limit.

Wapperdude

You might (should) consider changing the size of the paper or the scale of the drawing. If you shrink shapes, you lose the scale information (a couch should remain 6ft long!)

I think increasing the paper size (File > Page Setup > Page Size) is the easiest. You can then tell Visio to "print on 1 page across by 1 page down" so that you don't get your drawing tiled across a bunch of sheets of paper.

You can also hold down the Ctrl key, then mouse over the edge of the drawing page. When you see arrow cursors, you can then click and drag the paper to a new size - sort of an "infinite page" behavior. Then you use the "Print on...pages" feature to make sure you don't get print-tiling.

   Ok, I figured out how to do what it was i needed to do. This is how it goes. The original drawing gets copied, then you open a new document, t you then go to "paste special", then click on "picture (enhanced meta file)".  The plan gets pasted and you can either reduce or enlarde the origian  document with it "collapsing"

Eballas,
don't change the scale of your imported drawing. Think of all those 6ft couches around.
Rather go to the 3^rd tab of the page setup dialog, there you'll find the drawing scale. That's the only field that you should modify.
You can put in any decimal value you need.
You'll think about this advice, when you combine different drawings and have no information about the drawing scale, you set 6 months ago.