Visio (Re)naming shapes as 'sheet' when it should be circle, box, etc

Question

This may seem pretty idiotic, but here goes: I'm making some networks in visio and I'm literally just cutting and pasting boxes and circles (changing the text) over and over again and adding connectors as appropriate. I have a macro that then sorts the shape texts based on whether it is a circle or box.

Every once in a while the macro will fail, not because there is a problem with the macro but because one of my shapes (boxes, circles, and even connectors) have been renamed by visio as a 'sheet'. For example, I copy 'Circle.18' and then paste it right back in, and instead of being 'Circle.19' this shape is 'Sheet.19'. This can happen when I copy & paste, or when I drag a new shape off the stencil. It appears to be totally random when this happens, but it messes up my subsequent macro operation so I would really like to stop visio from naming different shapes as 'sheet.xx'

Any ideas?

Is it possible to change the name of a shape in the shapesheet or anything?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I don't know how the naming works in Visio, and I don't rely on the names for macros.

In your case, distinguishing the geometries from one another is how I would identify shapes. So if it's a 2D shape, and it has a geometry section with 6 rows, it's probably a rectangle. If the geometry section has 2 rows, it's probably a circle.

However, I wouldn't necessarily let it get to the point where I'm going off of the shape geometry, unless I want whoever is using the macro to use whatever circle or box shapes they want. Instead, I would just provide a stencil with a box and a circle shape, and I would either put the different shapes on different layers, or just add a user cell with the type clearly defined. Then the macro would just look for those shapes specifically denoted as the type I'm interested in.