Visio shape text diasappears?

[Jerry Davis]

Help! I am a new user to visio, and jumped in with a rather complex piping
schematic. Somewhere in my initial exploration, I managed to"switch off" the
shape text window for all the shapes in my schematic.

I can doulbe click on a shape, and the text box appears. I can type text
into the box. But when I de-seclect the shape or click on an open area in
the drawing the text boxes disappear.

How do I "show shape text" or get the text boxes to display?

thanks in advance!

 

[Paul Herber]

Help! I am a new user to visio, and jumped in with a rather complex piping
schematic. Somewhere in my initial exploration, I managed to"switch off" the
shape text window for all the shapes in my schematic.

I can doulbe click on a shape, and the text box appears. I can type text
into the box. But when I de-seclect the shape or click on an open area in
the drawing the text boxes disappear.

How do I "show shape text" or get the text boxes to display?

thanks in advance!

Sounds to me like you've set the text colour for all your shapes to
the same as the background.

Select all shapes (control-A) then menu Format -> Text
and set the font colour to black.

 

[Jerry Davis]

thanks for the suggestion, I tried it-no joy. Text color format is black.

 

[Paul Herber]

thanks for the suggestion, I tried it-no joy. Text color format is black.

Transparency?

 

[Jerry Davis]

Thanks Paul. I checked that as well-transp. set to "0". Still no joy.

The boxes are there when you double click a shape, and if I type something
in the box, it is captured as well. But when I de-select, the box
disappears. It's behaving as if the boxes are in a hidden layer, but I
checked and all layers are visible and active.

 

[Paul Herber]

Thanks Paul. I checked that as well-transp. set to "0". Still no joy.

The boxes are there when you double click a shape, and if I type something
in the box, it is captured as well. But when I de-select, the box
disappears. It's behaving as if the boxes are in a hidden layer, but I
checked and all layers are visible and active.

Does this happen with a new diagram? Even a simple block diagram.
Is your diagram created using some 3rd-party add-on?
Normally the text is just part of the shape, unless it's a grouped
shape in which it can get more complicated.

 

[Jerry Davis]

This behavior does not occur in a new diagram/drawing, but if I copy a shape
or the entire schematic from my "problem" file and paste it into a new
drawing, the disappearing text/label problem comes with it.

The diagram was created in Visio Pro 2007 (my first use of the sw).

The problem is present with all shapes in the problem file, "standards" from
visio shape templates, custom drawn shapes that I made, and grouped shapes.

 

[Paul Herber]

This behavior does not occur in a new diagram/drawing, but if I copy a shape
or the entire schematic from my "problem" file and paste it into a new
drawing, the disappearing text/label problem comes with it.

The diagram was created in Visio Pro 2007 (my first use of the sw).

The problem is present with all shapes in the problem file, "standards" from
visio shape templates, custom drawn shapes that I made, and grouped shapes.

Do you want to email it to me?
paul
at
pherber
dot
com
(in complete commercial confidence)

 

[Jerry Davis]

E-mail on the way. And thank you for the assistance.

I sent you a small subset of the drawing to keep the file size down. This
smaller file still exhibits the problem behavior, so it should illustrate
this for you.

thanks again,

 

[Paul Herber]

E-mail on the way. And thank you for the assistance.

Found the problem.
Each of the offending shapes has the following
OR(User.PEHideTag,User.PEPageHideTags)
in the HideText cell (menu Windows -> Show Shapesheet) and scroll down
to the Miscellaneous section.
and it's the cell User.PEPageHOdeTags that contains
ThePage!User.PEHideTags.
Click on the page so no shape is selected and go to the shapesheet as
above and set this cell to 0. All the shape text will now appear.

 

[Paul Herber]

E-mail on the way. And thank you for the assistance.

Actually, I'm wondering if this used to be a drawing created from the
Process Engineering template, that should invoke the PE addon which
has the ability to control the text flags, that's why the flags have
the PE prefix.

 

[Jerry Davis]

Mr. Herber, You are the MAN!!!

That solved the problem.

Yes, the file was created using the Process Engineering template. I have no
idea how that flag got set to "1", but that was the fix.

Five different "visio proficient" engineers in our office had tried, and no
one here could figure that out.

Thank you again for your assistance.

Jerry Davis

 

[Paul Herber]

Mr. Herber, You are the MAN!!!

That solved the problem.

Yes, the file was created using the Process Engineering template. I have no
idea how that flag got set to "1", but that was the fix.

Five different "visio proficient" engineers in our office had tried, and no
one here could figure that out.

Thank you again for your assistance.

My pleasure, glad it is now fixed.
But you need to look into how it got disconnected from the PE addon.

 

[zander345]

Sorry for the necro, but I just had to say that 10 years on, I had the exact same issue. Thanks so much for the fix!

 

[Ecololi4]

Thanks for this hint. I got the same issue, that was propagated by the database link ! I removed the associated Database and Visio stopped to hide the text of every single shape associated to Database linked element !