I have a shape in Visio which is a group. The group shape can have its text edited, and when it's edited I want one of the child shapes to sit just to the right of the text in the group shape.
To do this, I created a VBA function that takes the group shape as an argument, and this gets called in the TextText event on the shapesheet.
So the routine simply calls BoundingBox(visBBoxUprightText) on the group shape to get the bounds of the text and locate the sub shape to the right of the bbox. But the bounds appear to be wrong. They're coming back sometimes well to the left or well to the right of the last character.
Is the visBBoxUprightText flag supposed to mean something other than getting rectangle coordinates around the rendered text characters?
EDIT:
Looking into it some more, I see that the BoundingBox method looks at the shape.type property to determine what the boundingbox encloses. If the shape type is visGroup then it's going to include the sub shapes as well, and there doesn't seem to be a flag to force it to consider the group as a simple shape.
So I guess now the question is, is there a way to get the BoundingBox of the text, ignoring sub-shapes? I tried putting a separate sub-shape to hold the text, and now it works like a charm.
Visio does not let you get the bounding box of the text while disregarding the text of sub-shapes in a grouped shape.
Related
Is there a reason why my MS Word VBA macro is ignoring a dropdown list I placed inside a shape (a rich text box)? I've tried referring to it by tag, name, number, etc. I even had the macro tell me the count of content controls:
MsgBox(ActiveDocument.ContentControls.Count)
I get 0.
Nothing works. If I take it out of the shape, it works fine. MS Word gives me a count of 1 item. But for some reason MS Word won't acknowledge it inside the shape. Any help on how to do this?
Edited as my previous post was completely wrong.
Each textbox in the main text story is a Shape which you can access using an index number. A shape has various properties but text etc. is in its Textframe, if it has one. But in that case the Range you need is not called Range but TextRange. So, e.g. the first contentControl in Shape 2 is
ActiveDocument.Shapes(2).TextFrame.TextRange.ContentControls(1)
You will probably need to iterate through your shapes and you may need to verify that a given shape is a textbox and/or that it has a TextFrame.
If your text box is in another Story such as a header or footer, you will probably need to identify the relevant StoryRange.
I'm writing a code generation tool using VBA in Excel (don't ask why—long story). I need to be able to "parse" a flowchart.
The problem is that Excel allows shapes to contain text, with the exception of connectors: lines and arrows can't contain text. To label an arrow, you just put a text box on top of it—but the box isn't "attached" to the arrow in a way that VBA can easily capture.
For example, a user might draw something like this:
Within my VBA code, I can use ActiveSheet.Shapes to find that the flowchart contains seven shapes: there are five boxes (the two labels are just boxes with no border) and two arrows. Then Shape.TextFrame2 will tell me what's written inside each box, and Shape.ConnectorFormat will tell me which box goes at the start and end of each arrow.
What I need is code that can deduce:
Label A belongs to the arrow from Box 1 to Box 2
Label B belongs to the arrow from Box 1 to Box 3
I can think of three ways of doing this, none of them satisfactory.
Ask the user to group each label with its corresponding arrow.
Find out the coordinates of the endpoints of each arrow, then
calculate which arrows pass through which labels.
Find out the coordinates of the corners of each box, then calculate
which labels lie between which pairs of boxes.
Method 1 makes things easier for the programmer but harder for the user. It opens up a lot of potential for user error. I don't see this as an acceptable solution.
Method 2 would be reasonably easy to implement, except that I don't know how to find out the coordinates!
Method 3 is doable (Shape.Left etc will give the coordinates) but computationally quite messy. It also has potential for ambiguity (depending on placement, the same label may be associated with more than one arrow).
Note that methods 2 and 3 both involve trying to match every label with every arrow: the complexity is quadratic. Typical applications will have 10–50 arrows, so this approach is feasible, if somewhat inelegant.
Does anyone have a better idea? Ideally it would be something that doesn't involve coordinate geometry and complicated logic, and doesn't involve asking users to change the way they draw flowcharts.
Edited to add: example 2 in response to Tim Williams
Here's a label whose bounding box intersects the bounding box of both arrows, and whose midpoint isn't inside the bounding box of either arrow. Visually it's easy for a human to see that it belongs with the left arrow, but programmatically it's hard to deal with. If I can find out the coordinates of the arrows' endpoints, then I can calculate that one arrow passes through the label's box but the other doesn't. But if all I have is the bounding rectangles of the arrows, then it doesn't work.
Interesting problem. What if you considered the range covered by the arrow and the range covered by the textbox and matched them up based on the most overlap.
Sub ListShapes()
Dim shp As Shape
Dim shpArrow As Shape
Dim vaArrows As Variant
Dim i As Long
Dim rIntersect As Range
Dim aBestFit() As String
Dim lMax As Long
vaArrows = Split("Straight Arrow Connector 7,Straight Arrow Connector 9", ",")
ReDim aBestFit(LBound(vaArrows) To UBound(vaArrows))
For i = LBound(vaArrows) To UBound(vaArrows)
Set shpArrow = Sheet1.Shapes(vaArrows(i))
lMax = 0
For Each shp In Sheet1.Shapes
If shp.Name Like "Label*" Then
Set rIntersect = Intersect(Sheet1.Range(shp.TopLeftCell, shp.BottomRightCell), _
Sheet1.Range(shpArrow.TopLeftCell, shpArrow.BottomRightCell))
If Not rIntersect Is Nothing Then
If rIntersect.Count > lMax Then
lMax = rIntersect.Count
aBestFit(i) = shp.Name
End If
End If
End If
Next shp
Next i
For i = LBound(vaArrows) To UBound(vaArrows)
Debug.Print vaArrows(i), aBestFit(i)
Next i
End Sub
I tested this with the five box-two arrow setup and nothing more complicated. I put my two arrows in an array, but I assume you have ways to identify the arrows. I also named my untethered boxes "Label x" so I could identify them, but again I assume you have something more sophisticated.
The code loops through every arrow. Inside that loop, it loops through every shape. If it's a label, then it counts the cells in the intersection of the two ranges. Whichever has the most is stored in the best fit array.
It would be nice if you had a reasonable corpus of flow charts to test this to see where the pitfalls are. I don't think this is necessarily better than use the coordinates, just a different approach.
You can find the coordinates of the arrow's endpoints as follows.
First of all, the .Left, .Top, .Width and .Height properties describe the bounding rectangle of the arrow, as Tim Williams points out.
Next, check the .HorizontalFlip and .VerticalFlip properties. If both are false, then the arrow runs from top left to bottom right in its bounding rectangle. That is, the beginning of the arrow has coordinates (.Left,.Top) and the end has coordinates (.Left+.Width,.Top+.Height).
If either *.Flip is true, then the coordinates need to be swapped around as appropriate. E.g., if .HorizontalFlip is true but .VerticalFlip false, then the arrow runs from (.Left+.Width,.Top) to (.Left,.Top+.Height).
As far as I can tell, this is not documented anywhere on MSDN. Thanks to Andy Pope for mentioning it at excelforums.com.
Given this, method 2 seems like the best approach.
I have a report that is generated in PowerPoint, and underneath many of the graphs, there is text that tells the reader to refer to pages in the appendix. I would like to be able to dynamically reference these slides.
For example, under a graph I might have the text "Please see appendix page 54", but I need the 54 to be linked to a slide so that if I insert another slide it will say 55.
Is this possible to do in VBA? I do not expect somebody to write my code for me, I would just like to know if this is a reasonable thing to do before I spend hours attempting to do it.
Side note: I feel horrible asking a question about MS Office on here, but since I believe it would need to be implemented in VBA (I don't think this functionality is built in by default) I think that it is a relevant question.
No need to feel horrible asking this here.
How one might do this:
In PPT, shapes, slides and even the presentation itself can have an associated tag collection; named string values. For example, assuming a reference to the shape in oSh, you can do:
oSh.Tags.Add "AssociatedSlideId", "293"
In this case, you'd apply this tag to your graph; the 293 would be the SlideID of the slide you want to reference. Each slide has a unique SlideID assigned when it's created; the SlideID won't change when you move the slide around/add/delete slides.
To read the tag from the shape:
Debug.Print oSh.Tags("AssociatedSlideId")
In this case, that'd return "293". Feed that to FindBySlideID to get the SlideIndex of the slide (ie, the ordinal position of the slide in the presentation). Or ask it for SlideNumber if you want the number of the slide that'll appear in number placeholders (usually, but not always the same as slide index).
Debug.Print ActivePresentation.Slides.FindBySlideID(clng("293")).SlideIndex
You might also tag the textbox or other shape that you want to use to hold the reference, then write a function along the lines of:
Function ShapeTaggedWith(oSl as Slide, sTagName as String, sTagValue as String) as Shape
This would iterate through the shapes on slide oSl looking for one with a tag named sTagName, value = sTagValue and return it to the caller if found.
Now you can find the shape that's nominated as your caption for the graph, let's call it, and change its text to match the SlideIndex (or SlideNumber) of the slide the chart's supposed to reference.
Hope that's all moderately clear; if not, that's why the StackOverflow gods gave us comments.
I'll give an example with a SmartArt Shape, but it could be asked about other shapes too.
When I go over Slide.Shapes, one of the Shapes has:
Shape.Type=msoPlaceholder and Shape.PlaceholderFormat.ContainedType=msoSmartArt
Is there a way to get to the actual SmartArt Shape contained in the placeholder?
Late but in case anyone looks for an answer to this later:
On approach is to copy the placeholder shape. The copy will be a duplicate of whatever the .ContainedType of the placeholder was, not a placeholder itself.
This works in 2007 as well, btw.
I have 4 stacked textboxes in the body of an SSRS report and am getting a stray space / extra line between textboxes 3 & 4.
This is for an address block - name / title / email / website. Can't put it in a single textbox with intervening vbcrlf tokens because the email and website are links. I've tried formatting it to remove vertical spacing; also calculated the exact position by taking top + height to calculate the position. And of course I've tried positioning it so there are exactly 0 pixels between the text boxes. If I reverse the position of #3 & #4 the rendering looks the same so it isn't stray formatting characters in the data fields.
The solution is to wrap the stacked boxes in a rectangle.
I had this problem as well. It blew my mind until I started over on another part of the form. The new boxes worked perfectly until I moved them to the right of another set of text boxes which had some word wrap in them. I realized the wordwrapped boxes were directly related to the gaps I was seeing the set of textboxes to the right. I guess there's some kind of poor markup going on that tries to line things up horizontally and enclosing the set of textboxes in a rectangle protects them from it.
good idea on putting the info into a table - jumping off that idea - I'm going to construct a dynamic string in my query and output the dynamic string into a textbox. thank you for the idea, I don't know why I didn't think to do that.
Simpler thing is to just check text alignment - the default is "default" which appears to be centered. Changing the text box to the right to "left" fixed this problem for me.
Reduce padding property of the textbox.
Once dragging the textbox one closer to the other the tooltip shows convergence points between two textboxes - make tooltip show 0 points
it is best I could do to control the spacing