Editing Master Shapes

[deanimal]

I am using Visio 2007. I have a diagram with hundreds of shapes added  (I inherited it!). I want to change the master shape (pc.32) as I don't like the current one, but when I do and tell it to update all of them, it looses all the shape data. Is there a way to fix this? otherwise I have to keep the existing shape or add the data from scratch (way too much work in that!!)   Any help would be appreciated thankx

[Yacine]

With Visiclone you can easily add sections (eg geometry section) to several shapes, but you cannot delete any.
Sandrilla's tools may have more options.

[Paul Herber]

Thanks Yacine.
deanimal, you might like to try my Utilities for Visio at http://www.sandrila.co.uk/visio-utilities/ which can do shape substitute.

[deanimal]

Thank you Yacine & Paul, I'll give them a try 

[deanimal]

Hi Paul,

Ive been trying to use the shape substitute option, I created a new master shape and use it for the new shape name. When I apply the substitute command I get the error:  cannot find shape "PC.00" in the open stencil. What am I doing wrong?

Cheers

[Paul Herber]

Are you sure that shape PC.00 is really there? Use the stencil routines in the utilities to check the master names in the stencil.

[deanimal]

I was using the shape from my master stencil, when I moved it to a new stencil the substituion worked! however as the shape is made up from a number of lines and then grouped it did say it may not work correctly. What I found was it substituted the shape but still lost the shape data, which I need to keep. I left all the properties boxes ticked....