Fake Chapters with Shape Sheet

[raxlerik]

Hi

I am working on a specification document in Visio (Wireframes and descriptions for a mobile application) Due to a change in project approach we introduced chapters to the document and export them later separately as PDF for the Developers.

At the moment I'm maintaining the chapter and version information manually. But this will become a lot of effort in the future (Document will contain 50 - 70 chapters) and is a potential source for errors when others work with this document.

Is there a simple (semi-)automatic way to show the chapter name and version number of the chapter on each of it's pages?

My (newbie) way to achieve this would be:

1) Create a table with all relevant information on a dedicated page (e.g. Document history page)
2) Create a stencil which contains a text shape for the chapter name, a text for the chapter number and a text shape for the version.
3) Place the stencil on each page itself and select via context menu the according chapter number as ID for that shape.
4) As soon as the version number is changed in the table created in 1) the version number in the related shapes is updated (this could also work via a general

Is this possible in Visio 2003 and 2007? What would be the easiest way (I'm not that familiar with VBA or shape sheet functionality)? Is it possible to place the stencil on the background page and give the page itself the chapter ID?

Thank you in advance and best regards.

Axel

[vojo]

lots of ways to go here:
   - Could have a "legend" on each page....canned legend in stencils provided with visio
   - Could build a shape and use custom props to allow you set values via a drop down...add that to your special stencil
   - Other references in this forum talk about building a table of contents. (if always first page, can pretty easily just have shape set value TOC
   - Could build a template so that stencils, pages and behaviors are bundled together for ease of use.
   - etc.

Visio is OK with tables and such (change log)...not great but ok...so that may end up being tedious.

[Paul Herber]

Can the page names be changed to suit the chapter naming/numbering?
If so then this data can easily be accessed by shapes. It also allows pages to be reassigned within chapters easily. The page custom property data can also hold the version number data.