Broken Master links

Started by bh420y, August 02, 2011, 02:48:02 PM

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bh420y

I am fairly new to Visio, as well as Visio2010.  Through ignorance of how the program works, the links between the document masters and the shapes in the document got broken.  Is there a way of reestablishing the links between the shapes and their master?  A site search did not help.

I have looked at the ShapeSheet for linked shapes and broken-link-shapes and see no difference (though I am probably missing something).  This would not be a problem but the document has over a hundred shapes and custom shape data fields containing information. 

Therefore, an easier way than recreating the document would be greatly appreciated.  VBA code would be no problem once I know what to use.

Thanks in advance.

Paul Herber

There's probably no special reason why you should need to be able to relink the shapes back to their masters. It isn't so much a link, more that a shape is an instance of a master shape
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_copy
Besides, the link to the masters cannot be repaired.
Electronic and Electrical engineering, business and software stencils for Visio -

https://www.paulherber.co.uk/

bh420y

Thanks for the response.
The reason I want/need to reestablish the link is the project is still in the evolutionary stage.  I may need to add data fields or make format changes universally.

Jumpy

You can always use VBA to iterate through your shapes and make the changes you want there.

wapperdude

Point of clarification, did you actually break the link to the master?  To do so, requires that you ungroupped the placed shape.  Visio gives you a big fat warning before allowing you to go ahead.

Or, are you updating the master, but don't see that update the placed shapes?  When you drag and drop a shape from a stencil to a drawing, Visio creates a copy and places it in the document stencil.  This allows the user to send a document without attaching all of the various stencils that were used to create it.  But, if you want to do an update it means that you have to update the document stencil copy.  If you want this to be universally applied in the future, then, you either apply the same changes to the master stencil or copy/replace the master shape with the updated document stencil shape.

You might want to look at the following links:

About the document stencil  http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/visio-help/about-the-document-stencil-HP085051412.aspx

Visio Masters, Stencils, Templates, and Documents    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa200955(v=office.10).aspx


HTH
Wapperdude
Visio 2019 Pro

MacGyver

I have a similar problem and have enough different occurrences of a specific master on a drawing that there is a significant size difference between a drawing which has shapes linked to a master and one that does not.  In some of my drawings, I could reduce the drawing size from roughly 30+ Mb to 12 Mb which is very significant.  The smaller drawing loads much quicker and the macro's I run to perform a wide variety of tasks execute much quicker with these linked shapes.  Having the shapes linked to a master also makes it much easier to push updates to each shape in the drawing.

Any more advice on this topic would be greatly appreciated