does visio 2016 work with access 2010 and/or azure?

Started by CJ_London, June 19, 2017, 02:51:24 PM

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CJ_London

Hi,

My first post here. I am primarily an access/excel developer and now have a need for a client to use visio for presentation purposes.

I am getting to grips with Visio, but struggling to understand how it relates to other applications. For a bit of background, my client uses Access 2010 and I can get the visio viewer activeX control to display assorted visio files downloaded from the web as a test. So far so good.

I've now downloaded visio 2016 trial version and can create a simple organisation chart based on data retrieved from an access database (using the wizard). Also all well and good.

But I have two problems.

The first problem is that the visio file appears to be fixed. I cannot find a way to refresh the data if a change is made to the underlying data in Access, and I cannot see where to look to view that underlying data other than what is displayed. Is it not possible to link to the data? or does this have to be done with vba code in the documentopen event? Or perhaps there is a hidden table somewhere?

The second problem is I saved the file as a .vsdx, but although I have specified the full path and name in the visio viewer activeX control it does not appear. I don't get any errors and the control does display the ribbon at the top and the record navigator at the bottom, but it is clear there is no image displayed. Is this a problem with using access 2010 to view a 2016 .vsdx? If so, is there a fix?

If I can't solve these two problems, or at least have a satisfactory workaround (upgrading my client to office 2016 is not a satisfactory solution) then I'll need to abandon trying to use visio.

And if the problems are solved, I'll not doubt have some questions on deployment. But one step at a time.

Thank your for looking at this post and hopefully responding

UPDATE: made some progress. To see the dataset used for the basis of the diagram I need to use Data>Custom Import - works for both access and azure and appears to refresh OK. But then I guess I need coding to assign the data to a predefined layout?

CJ

scott

CJ -- I just stumbled across your post and don't know whether you've found answers anywhere else, but a couple of suggestions:

I'm glad you've discovered Data Linking -- it should handle the connections to Access and updating Access changes back to Visio. It should also handle linking rows of data to specific shapes in your layout, assuming your shapes contain a field (or fields) that can be used as a unique ID. Use Data>Advanced Data Linking>Link Data to create the data-to-shape links based on the unique ID. One gotcha: linking data to shapes happens per page so you either need to do it once, manually, for each page, or write code to make it happen across all pages.

Re displaying the Visio diagram: it is possible that Access 2010 can't display a VSDX -- I have no experience either way. You might try saving "down" to VSD to find out whether that works. As an alternative, and if the customer doesn't require that the Visio diagram appear inside Access, you might look into Visio Online (https://products.office.com/en-US/visio/visio-online). It allows for viewing Visio diagrams in any browser on any device. The key requirement is that the Visio docs need to be stored in SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business -- don't know whether that's an option for your customer. If it is, the browser/device flexibility and rendering are excellent.