Visio --> EMF metafiles for paste, say to Word

Started by gwideman, March 26, 2021, 08:48:48 AM

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gwideman

This was enough of a run-around that I thought I'd share the pain, er I mean solution.

What I want to do: Select some shapes in Visio, and "paste special" them into Word as a WMF or EMF, thereby preserving resolution and also allowing me to send the Word doc to a colleague who doesn't have Visio, but can use these EMFs in their own Word docs.

In Visio 2010 with Word 2010, you can't do that.  (And I don't know what other versions this applies to.) You can copy some shapes in Visio, and you can paste-special them back into Visio as EMF. But you can't paste-special > EMF them into Word, as it doesn't offer Paste Special for Visio clipboard items. It will only paste as a Visio object.  And that obviously defeats my previously-mentioned purpose.

I did find a workaround. 

1. In Visio, select the shape (or shapes, probably best to Group them) to be copied to Word.

2. Use Visio's Save As function and select EMF format.  Somewhat counterintuitively, this exports only the selected shapes to the saved file.

3. Now you can drag such an xxx.emf file and drop it into Word.

All that said, I 75% expect someone to jump in here and tell me the option that enables this to work just by copy-paste-special.

Graham

Paul Herber

Quote from: gwideman on March 26, 2021, 08:48:48 AM

2. Use Visio's Save As function and select EMF format.  Somewhat counterintuitively, this exports only the selected shapes to the saved file.


I think this is the normal for all of the export to image methods.
With nothing selected the whole page is saved.
Electronic and Electrical engineering, business and software stencils for Visio -

https://www.paulherber.co.uk/

wapperdude

That's pretty much the standard method.  As Paul indicates, if you don't do selection you can export full page.  The nice thing with that, you can uniquely arrange your shapes as needed before exporting.
Visio 2019 Pro