The art of selecting before doing 'copy'. (2000 SR

[deBart]

This one had me stomped.

I've been using Visio for years now. I often create a drawing in Visio and copy/paste that into Word. The procedure I use is CTRL+A & CTRL+C in Visio, then apply a macro in Word to paste. No problem for years.

Recently the pasted result in Word was sometimes messed up: part of the drawing was okay, part of it had shifted and was only partly visible. After many hours I found that when I change the copying procedure within Visio from CTRL+A, CTRL+C to 'click in the drawing to deselect everything and then CTRL+C' everything works okay!!

I don't get it. What is the difference between 'select all and copy' and 'deselect all and copy'????

Curious mind wants to know. I found the workaround, but still would like to understand...

[bonriki]

Bart

I do not use your method for inserting Visio dsrawings/charts in to Word. I use the Word Insert/Object function and have never had your problem. Using this way you can also link to the file ensuring that if you do update the drawing/chart the next the Word docuemnt is opened the drawing chart is updated.

Good luck

[deBart]

Phil,

Thanks for responding.

Due to the nature of our production process, I think there is a need *not* to link to the Visio-file. Sometimes the original Visio-file gets seperated from the Word-file.

I also posted the question in a newsgroup and received the following answer from Lori:

'Actually, the two are quite different.

Deselect all, then Copy Drawing copies the ENTIRE DRAWING (including
background pages). It's similar to Insert File.

Select and Copy only copies the selected items--nothing more. It also
"shrink wraps" the copied drawing page around the selected items. This is
usually just fine--as long as you don't have any important background pages.'

But it still does not explain *what* goes wrong, nor *why*. Oh well, just may have to learn to live with it and get on with the job <img src=/S/compute.gif border=0 alt=compute width=40 height=20>

[Don_Sadler]

In the course of searching for an answer to a related problem, I saw this and thought that, despite it being three years old, I would add to it. I noticed/learned something today about copying/pasting drawings. I have previously either done a Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C to select all then copy OR I would simply drag the cursor to include the entire drawing then do Ctrl-C. Once copied, I would paste it in Word as a device independent bitmap. I found that when I did that, not only did I copy/paste the drawing but also all the drawing dimensions (measurements of walls, doors, an so on). Although this could be useful, it was annoying to me and I found that if, instead of using my normal copying method, I simply used the menu option of copy drawing, I was able to copy/paste the drawing exactly as I wanted. This is for Visio 2003, BTW.