Visio - creating Masters sheets and applying changes from master sheet to multiple changes in one step

Question

What I am trying to achieve is to minimize the number of times that I have to cut and paste process model boxes on 50-85 separate Visio sheets (all are in one Visio File).  Everytime i make a change to the wording in the process box on the main page, I have to go to each and every Visio sheet to first see if that process box is on that specific sheet and if it is , then I paste the updated box.  I have to repeat this task for each sheet and this takes a lot of effort and time.  We also make a lot of changes to the processes on a weekly basis so the time to adjust each and every Visio sheet is adding up.

I was told be a colleague that if I create a master Visio sheet and make changes on it, those changes will automatically be applied to any other sheets that have the same information.  He told me that it could be done but did not know how to do it. 

Since I only know OLE embedding, I tried to to a Paste Special and dropped the boxes as linked Visio objects but it did not work. 

Is there another method that you can offer? Is this functionality available in Office 2007 or Office 2010? I really appreciate your help in advance and would like to thank you for taking the time to reply.

Answer 1

Sounds like they were talking about background pages. You can define common items on the background page and then overlay other items by including them on a foreground page.

My prefered option would be connecting the drawings to a data source. Assign a key to each shape and connect the drawing to a data source. Update the data source, refresh the links and everything is now up to date.

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John... the original Visio MVP (since 1993) Visio.MVPs.org