Paul Herber – Sandrila Ltd

On the newsgroup “microsoft.public.visio.general” the other day a user asked about how to pop up a dialog box showing custom text when a Visio shape is double-clicked.

I’ve created a Visio addon to do this, you can download it is from :
http://www.sandrila.co.uk/binaries/outputdialog.zip

Instructions

1. Create a folder ’sandrila/outputdialog’
2. Unzip this zip file into this folder
3. Start Visio
4. From the Tools menu go to File Paths (different versions of Visio put this in
   slightly different places)
5. Add the path to the above folder e.g. ‘C:/Program Files/sandrila/outputdialog’
   to the Add-ons path. If there is already something there then separate the paths
   with a ‘;’ e.g. Solutions;C:/Program Files/sandrila/outputdialog
6. Load the included drawing into Visio and double click the shape.
   The shape’s shapesheet Events EventDblClick cell contains
   =RUNADDONWARGS(“outputdialog.exe”,”here is some text”)
   Copy this into the EventDblClick cells of your own shapes

The exe file is digitally signed for your security.