Linking Excel cells into a visio document

[tomek225]

Hello all,

I have an excel sheet with 20 cells in a single column (various sensors on a machine like temperatures/vibrations etc). I have a visio drawing of this piece of equipment and various bubbles with where these sensors should be located on the machinery.

I would like to assign each bubble a specific excel cell so that I can copy/paste new sensors into excel and have the bubbles in the visio file update with the newest sensors from the piece of machinery.

So the questions i have: How do I properly link a specific cell in excel to a shape in visio which also needs to be updated multiple times?

I tried to search this here and in google and in visio help and have not been able to do it successfully where it shows only the information in 1 cell.

Microsoft Excel and Visio 2007 edition.

thanks!

[Jumpy]

What Visio 2007 edition? Standard or Professional?
Datalink feature only works with professional.

[aledlund]

If you're willing to share a copy of sample excel and visio, I'd be happy to look (assumes your at v2007 pro or above).
al

[tomek225]

I am trying to find out which I have...

I click on Help -> About Microsoft Office Visio
And it says Microsoft Office Visio 2007 (12.0....) SP2 MSO (12.0...)

Am I looking in the wrong place to see if it is Standard or Profesional?

thanks!

[tomek225]

Sorry about being such a Newb, I just started using Visio recently.

@aledlund - once i find out if I have pro, I will attach "sample" files (can't attach customer confidential information).

thanks for the help.

[tomek225]

Ok, so I do have Visio Professional 2007 (went to regular visio help instead of about visio).

In the first column of the excel files are the "sensor names" that correspond to a location in the drawing. What i would like to do is change these sensor names and have them update in the visio.

thanks!

[aledlund]

you might check this out. Chris and David do a great job in the video.

http://visio.microsoft.com/en-us/Get_Started/How_To/Pages/Session-8-Dynamically-link-business-data-to-shapes.aspx

al

[tomek225]

Al - thanks for the video!

The only thing I have left to ask.... So when i link it to a shape it takes the first row (sensor) and adds it infront of the actual tag I want. So for example I only want the shape to have "BRG_1X" but after I link it it shows " Sensor   BRG_1X". Is there any clean way of not including that in the shape? The only work around I thought of is just putting a space in the cell instead of "sensor".


thanks again for the help, I am 99% there, just this minor detail.

[tomek225]

I ask for help too fast... just needed to play around a little bit. Just changed the "edit data graphic" box. I am good now. Thank you for your help again AL!

[abssorb]

I also need to achieve this, but - I'm constrained in that my client's corporate PC build only has visio 2003 professional.

Would it still be possible?

[aledlund]

you would have to write the code yourself, since it became natively available in v2007 pro.
al