mass editing of visio shape text

[visioN00b]

Hello,

First I'd like to say I learned so much in the last hour reading this forum. Excellent forum!

Visio 2003

I have a visio drawing representing a network. The network diagram is very detailed and includes numbers for all of the cables. During the design process, many features change in the network topology and as a result cables are added and deleted.  At the end of the design phase, I may have deleted dozens of cables resulting in breaks in the cable number sequence. This sounds rather simple, but manually editing 3,000 to 8,000 cables can be a very time consuming task. The time is much better spent on server, routing, and switching configs.

For the time being, my work around is to export the data to an excel spreadsheet and then just drag down the columns to place to cable numbers back in sequence. Of course, I have not been able to link the excel spreadsheet so that it updates visio drawing, which requires I go back and renumber the cables in the visio drawing manually. (ouch)

My question, is there an easy way to maintain the sequence of cable numbers (in shape text) once I am forced to delete or add a line representing a cable?

Is there someway to have changes in the spreadsheet be reflected in the visio drawing? I have been unable to make this happen. I am assuming the other approach is using some sort of script or macro, but I have no experience with macros and what little VB I have done was years ago in college.

If a macro is the best approach, I have the following scenario. What you see in quotes would be my shape text:

"Cable #2310" has to be deleted, so I need "Cable #2311" to become "Cable #2310", "Cable #2312" to become "Cable #2311", etc. etc..

If any of you could help I would be most appreciative.

Thank you!

[visioN00b]

Update

I discovered a tool under add ons that allows you to number shapes in sequence by clicking on them. This is exactly what I need to do, but this only applies to shapes. In all cases my cables are represented by lines or connectors. 

[visioN00b]

When I export my visio drawing to excel is there are way to link the two, so that when I edit the shape.text column in excel, it updates the visio drawing?

Thanks and my apologies for the flurry of posts.

[aledlund]

I believe the database wizard will allow you to roundtrip a drawing's data with excel. Anything much beyond what it supplies will require custom coding.
al

[visioN00b]

Thanks for your response aledlund, I did a little more tinkering with the database wizard and figured out how to make it work. I am running into the same problem as the gentleman in the post below. The database wizard either allows you to link all the shapekeys to a default value, or you can select none. Either way, linking the shapekeys requires a right click and then manually linking the shape to the excel worksheet. I'm not sure if anything has changed since the post below, but this pretty much kills my idea. Manually linking 8000 shapes is as bad as manually editing the shape text, which is what I was trying to avoid.

Again, thanks for your help.

http://visguy.com/vgforum/index.php?topic=1235.0

Edit:

Al, I also saw you were involved in this thread on another forum, same problem I am having. Thanks.

http://help.wugnet.com/office2/Link-existing-data-drawing-database-refresh-ftopict847691.html