Searching shapes and making stencils

[Reepi]

Hahaha at this point in time we are moving from Visio to a custom built software that in theory will do what we want better than Visio does.  The reason I'm doing what I'm doing now is because we want to keep the stencils we made, so we contracted the developer to build us a tool to convert and bulk upload from our stencil files to the new system, but the method they are using to apply keywords to the stencils requires them to be broken down into smaller packs.

I also have to remove the smart functions because the new system doesn't support them.  I made my argument for the new software to support similar functions, but it wasn't considered within the scope of our MVP.  Maybe in the future.  So for now I'm having to take each stencil with a few dozen permutations and break them apart into a few dozen stencils each and just hold back my tears.

[wapperdude]

Custom, eh?  That'll take some time to get to maturity.  If this post was about your task, then take a look at the code.  If I understood correctly, it will do what you want.

If not proprietary, what is it that Visio isn't doing?

MVP???  As in Visio MVP?

[Nikolay]

@wapperdude
MVP = Minimum Valuable Product (beta-version, that is beta than nothing) 

@Reepi
Just out of the curiosity, why have you decided to ditch Visio?

[wapperdude]

@Nikolay:  😂😂😂.  Wasn't his decision; was company decision.

@Reepi:  Obviously, during transition, you can still use Visio.  What about afterwards?  We're here.  Happy to assist where possible, permissible.

[Reepi]

I was having too much fun, so decided to finish this.  Here's code that will grab selected shapes in the shapes window and drop them onto another stencil.  The assumptions are that name and path of target stencil are know and hardcoded into the macro.  Before running the macro, shape search has been performed and shapes have been selected.  The process may be repeated if desired.  Once finished, the target stencil must be manually saved and closed.

Oh wow! That's super cool.  Thank you!!

[Reepi]

As far as your questions about why we are ditching Visio go... hmmm

I mean it really just comes down to that we needed something we could hammer visio into doing with macros and other... creativity, but it wasn't something visio was really made for. 

We take radiological surveys on systems that are or are potentially contaminated as part of a nuclear power plant and we have to record that information and retain it.  We had been doing that on paper until a few years ago and then we were given a deadline for when we would no longer be able to archive our hard copies.  So we had to come up with an alternative quickly.  We like having searchable library of images that represent all the things we could potentially need to survey and we were able to build in a lot of functionality, but being at the worksite and using a tablet and trying to place survey points down and enter in data using a touch screen was rough.  Also there is just a lot of room for user error, our end users are often not tech savvy and resistant to new knowledge requirements (tbh, our job requires a lot of knowledge we are regularly tested on, so it feels like a big ask to figure out how visio works on top of all of that) so people accidently delete things or change things they didn't mean to, or they want to change something that we protected so it wouldn't get changed on accident and they don't know how to unprotect it or whatever.  We also were using a homebuilt system made in excel to manage moving the visio files around because there are hundreds of files associated with each project, dozens of projects, many people on each project who are freely moved around, and each file has to be reviewed and signed by multiple people (and sometimes sent back to correct).  The new system integrates the record generation and moving the records around. There are also assorted security concerns and other things... they want us to be able to do what we need to do for our job and not have access to do anything else.

The roll-out will be pretty slow, and we may end up using visio as a drawing program to import into the new system for a while just because we don't have better options and the new program has very minimal drawing tools.