I've been using the "Shape Reports" and "Custom Import" tools to create a link between excel worksheets and a visio drawing. My drawing has some shapes which are valves and some which are equipment, and each valve or equipment item has a TAG (unique). Each shape has a user-defined cell "User.CPMSetList", which has a value of "Equipment" or "Valve" as approrpiate, and this cell is used to generate the corect excel worksheet (valve list or equipment list). I then copy the excel generated lists to another workbook (which has formulae for calculating the size of the valve and the properties of the pump etc). I used "Link Data" to link the excel and the visio shape data.
For a while, everything works fine. If I modify the shape data in visio and then "Refresh All", the excel data is updated and if I update the excel data and "Refresh All" the visio shape data is updated. This is exactly what I want.
HOWEVER! At a certain point in time, the updating goes crazy. All of a sudden, my valve TAG has changed to an Equipment TAG, and the valve shape now has shape data appropriate for Equipment and not for a Valve.
I've tried re-creating the drawing. I've tried it using Visios Process Engineering set of tools, and I've also tried to re-create the same functionality without using the Process Engineering set of tools. But eventually, whatever I do, I hit the same problem.
I'm wondering if maybe I accidentally duplicate a TAG and that sends the whole thing crazy? I'm not sure that I do, but I really don't know where to go next.
PS. I actually have 5 lists: Equipment; Valve; Motor; Instrument; Pipeline