Help! need information re excel in visio

[berrick]

Hi,

Thanks for reading this post. Hopefully someone can assist, answer question or point me in the right direction?

• PC running Windows 7 Pro x64
• Visio Pro 2010 32 bit

I was trying to link an Excel range to Visio shape and posted http://visguy.com/vgforum/index.php?topic=8206.0 but as it is un answered and my searches and attempts haven't worked assume this is not possible.

I therefore tried to link the named range in visio on a separate sheet. This has been kinda successful.

What happens is I can bring in the part of the spreadsheet I want and it does update if the data in the spreadsheet is altered. However if I try and create another link to a different named range within the same spread sheet I just end up with two copies of the same information

Questions

• Is it possible to have multiple different links to different data in the same spreadsheet
• should the connections show up in excel. The Edit Links button is greyed out

TYIA

[Yacine]

Obviously Visio finds only the first named range in a spreadsheet.
You can however define your own custom range in an already used spreadsheet.

HTH,
Y.

[berrick]

Hi Yacine,

Many thanks for the included example this helped my understanding and confirmed what I suspected.

This was how I originally wanted to use the data in the spreadsheet but as it is limited for my needs changed my approach to wanting to link and embed the ranges on another sheet. It may help if I explain a little more.

I'm trying to create one document which will provide all the information a user may need about multiple sites, the equipment on those sites and asset details. The visio diagram which details each of these sites have multiple devices connected to other pieces of equipment but if these were all shown individually would make for a very cluttered diagram.

As multiple devices are connected to single devices my thinking was to represent these with one image/shape and use a hyperlink to take the user to another sheet with the embedded linked excel named range on it.

This way when assets changed only the spreadsheet would need up dating.

I'm not a regular user of visio so all this is pretty much new ground for me. Therefore if there is a better way to achieve my goal I'm interested to learn.

Any questions or if you need more info let me know

[Yacine]

Basically the idea is good, but an upload is worth a thousand words .

[berrick]

Hi,

Sorry for the delay but have been working away. Any how see if this helps.

The first image is a representation of what the visio diagram will look like. The smaller red box's represent the hyperlinks to other sheets within the diagram which I want to hold the excel range, image two. 

So in the case of this diagram there would be four sheets containing different ranges from the master spreadsheet.

[berrick]

Hi Everyone,

Does anyone have any ideas on how to achieve this. Is it even possible?

Kind regards

[berrick]

So the lack of a response means its not possible 

Well I figured out a way to achieve a similar result but is more time consuming but it works

my "fix" was to create individual rectangles to take the place of the cells in excel then position them in a row. Once I did this I could copy and paste or create a shape to build up the "rows" of my spreadsheet. (Important not to group the cells or make sure they aren't group before linking data)

I then linked to the excel spreadsheet using the "link data to shape" button on the data tab. Then with a row of cells selected (not grouped) I click the relevant row from the linked data to link it to the selected shapes.

I found if this was the first time I had linked data to the rectangles in my row I had to click on each rectangle individually to select it then click the insert tab -> field tab (or use ctl + F9) select Shape data from the category menu and select the relevant field name for the actual data I wanted to appear in that rectangle.

Hope this helps someone in the future