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Brian EsserFlag for United States of America

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Visio 2003 Custom Properties Question

Way back in Visio 2000 days I created a Stencil with Shapes that had custom properties. I haven't had to use these for years, but now a project has come up and I need to use them again with the excepton that now I need to add new properties. Currently, we are using Visio 2003 and I can't for the life of me remember how to get a property to update text on the shape based on a link to the property field. I've got 3 previously linked text fields, copied one of them twice to create two more, but I can't figure out or reverse engineer the existing links to get the new ones linked properly. I vaugely remember the original process I used, but I think I had to manually edit the Shape Sheet.

I have a User-defined Cells Section with User.param, User.Row_2 through 4 with a Value in User.Row_4 of Sheet.5!Prop.param04

I don't remember how to duplicate this for the new item and create a link to the custom property.

Any help would certainly be appreciated.

Thanks,
Brian
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Brian Mulder
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Hi bruintje,

Thanks for taking a crack at this question. It is a challenge to describe my problem sufficiently with just text. I wish there was a place one could post links to a few screen captures. Oh well...

I actually need to do the opposite of what you describe in your post. The Custom Property drives the (TheText) not the other way around.

BrianE
bruintje,

After beating my head against this some more I revisited the link you posted and studied the postings there much closer. It was after re-reading ALL the comments several times that I recognized the key piece of information I had forgotten when building the original shapes so long ago:

Mark Nelson of MS wrote: "If you want the shape text to always refer to the custom property, go to Insert > Field to set up that relationship."

I selected one of my existing Text shapes that functioned the way I wanted and did the Insert > Field operation, which revealed the existing User Defined definition. Then, I simply selected one of the copied Text shapes and Inserted a new User Defined parameter and tied it to the new Custom Property ROW_7 instead of existing ROW_6.

That's IT!

Thanks for actually getting me where I needed to be the first time. I was just too dense too recognize it when I first arrived there.

Best regards,
BrianE