Continuing support for .vsx format stencils

[Paul Herber]

Hi all, I'm considering dropping my .vsx format stencils as these haven't been supported fully since Visio 2010. Support of .vss and .vssx should be adequate. Any thoughts?

[Surrogate]

Hi, Paul!

Earlier in one of the discussions on this forum, you gave statistics on the versions that your customers use. What percentage of your customers are using versions before 2010?

[Paul Herber]

It's about 20% but they can all use the .vss version. I think it's a no-no-no-brainer.

[Surrogate]

Unexpectedly, I thought a lot less!

Yes, of course vss is quite suitable for this category of users!
I personally have never done vsx files myself, very rarely used vdx (mostly to deal with Error #1). Often did not use it, because the file size grew by 15 times!
What are the advantages of vsx documents?

[Paul Herber]

.vsx format can be edited with a standard text editor, if you can follow the XML, and .vsx can be imported by some non-Visio drawing packages, and these comprise a small %age of my users, but some of these can also import the other formats, it's difficult to find out which formats, web sites just say things like "Pro version can import from Visio".

[Surrogate]

I once tried to edit the text of a figure in a vsx file using a text editor. The file didn't open after that
reading a visio document in xml format works great !!!

[wapperdude]

I suspect drop it.  The final say will be users impacted by the decision.  At least, don't put any new development effort into that format.

[Paul Herber]

Thanks for your thoughts. I have made an executive decision and .vsx format has now left the building for future updates.