Question

I need some suggestion on how to query a VISIO Shape.cells collection in vb or vba.

I have written an application to drop a shape on a page and I can change its name after dropping it on the page. Now I want to examine the shape cells collection.

Thanks

Answer 1

Visio shape cells are broken up into different sections. Such sections might include User Cells, Actions, or Character settings. There are also a series of named cells that you can only (I think) access through the name (i.e. PinX or PinY).

So to query a shape’s cells, you first have to figure out what section of cells you’re talking about. To loop through a cell section, you first get the number of rows in the section, then loop through that section using the CellsSRC method on the shape object.

Dim TheShp As Visio.Shape
Set TheShp = ActiveWindow.Selection.Item(1)
Dim TheSec As Visio.Section
Dim TheCell As Visio.Cell
Set TheSec = TheShp.Section(visSectionUser)
Dim RowNum As Long
For RowNum = 0 To TheSec.Count - 1
    Set TheCell = TheShp.CellsSRC(visSectionUser, RowNum, 0)
    Debug.Print TheCell.Formula
    Debug.Print TheCell.Result(visNone)
Next CellNum

Looping in this way can be slow if there are a lot of cells in a lot of shapes. If you need to access the formulas or results of a large number of cells, there are GetFormulas and GetResults methods on the Page object that take arrays of SRC values and shape ID’s that will pull all those Formulas/Results at the same time.