Editing shape text from Excel

[jmak94]

Hello all, just joined.
I've searched for a couple hours here on the forum and across the net and haven't found what I have been looking for, save for some VB code.

I have Visio Premium 2010 and Excel 2010. I am trying to link an Excel sheet to my Visio drawing. I have made it so far as to bring in the Excel sheet as an external reference inside Visio and link my Excel data to my Visio shape data.

Now the problem,
No matter what I do I can't get the 'shape text' to update. For example I have an indicator shape with text '1000'. In Excel, and the Visio shape data, I have changed this indicator to '1001'. The shape however still reads as '1000'. Is there a way to get this value to sync through Visio/Excel without having to use VB code? I would really not like to use VB code for this as other people might edit this file in the future.

A second problem I am seeing is that if I edit the shape data in Visio, it will not update automatically in Excel. I assume this is because I have to go through and do a shape report, but this seems tedious. Is there a simpler way to do this?

Thank you all! This seems to be an excellent forum which I will be using a lot as I am brand new to Visio.

[jmak94]

I found out a way using custom tags. Still would like other peoples input though.

[Bubba2413]

looking for something similar, but from word vs excel.. how did you get yours done?

[jmak94]

I'm using 2010, so things may be different.

I went to the Data tab, then to Link Data to Shapes. This brings up a box for selecting where your data is from. These are the options:
Excel, Access, MS SharePoint, MS SQL, or Other OLEDB or ODBC.

So I'm not sure if you can actually use Word unless you write your own VB code. Can you bring it into Excel?

After this, in Excel, You can set up your columns of data and use this information to link to your shapes. You may have to edit your shapes Tag so that "Example Column Name" from Excel can link to "Example Column Name" in your Visio tag.