Why no shape copy within group?

[kennyj]

Hi Paul,

I've been trying out your software, and when I attempt to copy props etc of a subshape within a group, I get a message asking to please select 1 shape. (Actually burned through much of my free trial on those failed attempts, before I sorted out what was happening - lol) Anyway, when I then copy a subshape to stand alone from the group, it loses all of its references to the group, which then of course can't be copied to the new shape.

The copy feature is still of some limited use to me, because I can get the main part of the rows copied, but then I have to go in and manually fix all of the fields with references.

Is this an intentional limitation of the shapes copy feature? Any work around?

Thanks,

-k

[Paul Herber]

Hi Kenny, thanks for trying the utilities.
When in normal page view mode, with a sub-shape selected as far as I know there is nothing any external code can do to find out about this selection. The normal code for accessing selected shapes on a page:
.ActiveWindow.Selection
is empty. This is how my code works out what shape you have selected. However, if you open the grouped shape and select on of the sub-shapes then the selection works correctly.
This is just normal Visio operation.

Copying cells that refer to any other shape cell (other shape or sub-shape's owner) will always be problematical.  If a sub-shape refers to its parent (say, sheet.17) then copying this sub-shape's cells to another shape will keep the reference to sheet.17. That might be what you want, it might not, I don't think there is any way to do otherwise.

[kennyj]

That's helpful. Thanks, Paul.

k