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Ran cross another handy feature of Visio – Shape Reports!

If you’re like me and love manipulating data in Excel to clean up and use elsewhere, rather than doing it the long, slow and manual way, then you will probably like to explore this feature of Visio.

I recently created a state chart and I needed a quick export of all of the states I used on the diagram.

Sure, I could manually type them out, or individually copy and paste each one into a document, but that’s now how I like to operate! If there’s a tool for the job – I like to use it.

So I opened up the ‘Shape Reports’ option under the ‘Review’ ribbon and begin to design my extract.

We want to create a new report, so go ahead and click that to begin the new report wizard.

Now, depending on what you’re doing or what data you’re trying to extract out of your model, you can export everything (easiest – but takes longer to clean up) or put some criteria around what you want to export (little bit trickier but my favorite!)

Easiest option is to create an export using the ‘Shapes on the current page’ and click through the wizard with the default options  and selecting  ‘Show all properties’. This will give you a dump of all properties and you can filter through what you need in Excel.

Personally I like to extract just what I need from the model, so I set some export criteria using the ‘Advanced’ option on Wizard step numero uno.

Here you can define some conditions for what you want to pull out of your model. For the above example I’ve opted to ignore the transition shapes as I just want to see a list of state names.

Play around with what’s available, particularly under the ‘Master Name’ property, to find the criteria your after.

So proceeding with example of not including ‘transition’ elements, you can then move on to selecting what properties to export.

Again, depending on what your modelling and how you defined it, your requirements may differ here. In my example I’ll be using ‘Displayed Text’ – as that’s the exact data set I’m looking for.

Give your a report a name on the next step and then a report definition (for recognizing the report later on!).

Double click your newly created report to see the results.

You need to select an export format, as I said earlier, Excel is my personal favourite for manipulating large amounts of text and filtering – but the choice is entirely yours of course.

Voila! Your data is exported in a lovely styled format ready to use as you please.

I kind of skipped over the selecting the report criteria section, so if anyone would like more guidance in that area let me know!

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8 Responses to Using Visio Shape Reports to export detail from your diagrams

  1. Barry says:

    suhweet!! thx for the info

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  2. I have a chapter about Visio Reports in my book – http://www.visualizinginformation.com/ – if anyone is interested….

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  3. Ramesh says:

    It does not copy the same sequence of a process map to excel.

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  4. EOlsen says:

    Now this is what I was looking for. I am trying to extract Time Duration data from my process flow. This gets me started in the right direction. Thank you.

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  5. Natalie says:

    Hi,
    I am trying to get the actual info displayed in the Entities into Excel, forexample if my entity name is Vendor and has these attributes : Vendor ID, name and date , i want to return something like this in excel:
    VENDOR
    Vendor ID
    Vendor Name
    Date

    How can I do that? I am using Visio 2010.
    HELPPPPP :-(

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  6. Hamish says:

    Hi Natalie,

    On the step during the wizard that is labelled ‘Choose the properties… ‘ you should be able to select (tick) the properties that you require:

    VENDOR
    Vendor ID
    Vendor Name
    Date

    If they are not available to select perhaps you have added your attributes in a different way?

    Hope that works for you!

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  7. [...] Using Visio Shape Reports to export detail from your diagrams, Hamish King does a great job of showing how easy the export to Excel can now be. If you’re [...]

  8. Lori Witzel says:

    Hi Hamish – thanks much for this post! One of my colleagues at Seilevel, Joyce Grapes, just linked to it in a post (tips for Business Analysts) on the Seilevel blog.

    Wanted to share it with you and your readers here:
    http://requirements.seilevel.com/blog/2012/04/business-analyst-tip-exporting-shape-information-from-microsoft%C2%AE-visio-2010.html

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