Keeping shapes within their swimlane when resizing cross functional diagram

[icarus69]

Hi All,

I'm VERY new to this forum so I hope this is the correct section to post this topic. If not please let me know.

I've been tasked with re-formatting a bunch of cross functional diagrams to include a background. These ones are giving me a lot of grief where the same process has been working for another set of diagrams! I'm using Visio 2007.

All I need to do is select all the shapes using Ctrl + A and basically grab the bottom handle to drag it up by about three squares so it doesn't cover a background object. In other diagrams, the process I've gone through that works brilliantly was to select all the shapes, apply a formula to the shapesheet that resizes the text proportionally within each shape, then still with all selected, grab and drag the bottom handle up a little to make the room.

But for this set of diagrams, when I do the above process many of the shapes seem to 'explode' out into other swim lanes after I release the mouse button. I can't find the setting to keep the shapes within their lanes when resizing!

Things I've found/tried so far:
- the fix this forum post but it wasn't applicable:
http://visguy.com/vgforum/index.php?topic=1459.0

- Protecting the aspect ratio, X position and Y position. But this doesn't give the result I'm after.

Any suggestions would be appreciated and will stop me from losing my hair at young age!

Many thanks!

[Paul Herber]

I've just tried this (without the background image) and I don't think your resizing method works. It seems to me the best way is to resize each each swimlane in turn.

[icarus69]

Just trying that now - if I resize just the swim lanes, it only seems to reduce the size of the 'text box' at the top of the lane.

My other method worked on another set of diagrams. The only obvious difference here is these diagrams have separators within them. I've removed all the protections from the shapes. Could there be a setting somewhere?

When I select all then click and drag the bottom handle up, before releasing the mouse button visio shows the whole diagram nicely spaced and resized looking the way I want it. Then once releasing the mouse button, the shapes throw themselves everywhere either up into other lanes and/or overlapping other shapes.

Is there perhaps a setting somewhere that I can lock a shape to it's swimlane but still resize it?

Thanks for your help so far!

[icarus69]

And a further thought - would this all work more easily if I were using Visio 2010?

[Paul Herber]

Have you been ungrouping shapes? That will permanently break them.
Visio 2010/2013 do x-functional charts very differently.

[icarus69]

Hi Paul,

No haven't been ungrouping. I played around with grouping the shapes in their individual swimlanes but this only resulted in the overall diagram resizing, but each box of grouped shapes wouldn't resize nicely.

For the time being I have found a work around - that is applying the background (with images and text fields and then expanding out the canvas size. This takes the diagram outside of the printable area, but that is a small issue to deal with.

If I could post a before and after image I would but the documents are too confidential.

I'd still like to find the correct work around for this so I'm open for further suggestions!

Thank you