Auto Renumbering - Visio 2010 - Visio Extras Not Helpful

[Dave Furman]

As part of my job function, I will often create in Visio 2010 process maps that have well over 100 shapes. Often, I will have to add a shape at the beginning of the proecss, which will necessitate complete renumbering of my shapes.  Going to Visio Extras, none of the options are helpful:

- Manually by clicking -- This requires me to click on each shape. Not only is this time consuming, often the number is registered as a text instead of a number, and so by clicking on the shape I just see a number posted on top of the already existing number.
- Auto number- This is always a disaster, and will place a number on every item in the page- including headings / text boxes which we don't number
- Renumber maintaining sequence - This in theory should be my best option, but it either does nothing, or gives me the same problems as Auto Number

Honestly, I don't understand why my request in Visio is so difficult.  All I would want it to do is automatically take every item that is already numbered and increase it by one at the click of a button, without anything new getting numbered.  Is there any way this is possible in Visio 2010 to spare me the manual effort?

Thanks for your help!

[Paul Herber]

Have you tried just selecting the shapes you want numbered, then in the dialog setting the Start With to 1?

[Dave Furman]

That's an interesting suggestion. One problem I encountered in doing that, is that Visio renumbers each shape according to how it reads the map.  As a result, I have noticed that certain shapes that according to most people would be interpreted as being the next logical shape in the process, is not assigned the next number by Visio.  My wish, would be to take all the existing numbers the way they are already numbered, and simply have each number automatically go up by the amount of boxes that were added to the process.