While I was creating the cruise demo, I ran into a problem removing the data source from the connected data. I had created the drawing and tried it as a data connected diagram and went back and tweaked the drawing. Since I wanted to start the demo with a clean diagram I tried to remove the reference to the source Excel file. I have done it several times on other drawings, You right click the External Data window and the last item in the drop down is Data Source. Select that and the drop down give you a Remove option. This will produce a warning dialog asking if you really want to do that, but in this case when I clicked, the drawing hung with a (Not Responding) tag. I went and had lunch and it was still hung.
Since a Visio drawing file is the same as other Office apps, a zipped version of a directory of XML and other files, I tried to unzip a test file to see if I could manually remove the reference. That only produced a corrupted file when I compressed and renamed the file.
It turns out the solution was easier than I thought. Just Cut and paste.
I selected the shapes I used, did a copy and then pasted into a new drawing. Visio was smart enough to know I was copying shapes that were part of linked drawing and asked.
“The pasted shapes were linked to data that is not in this document. Do you want to also paste the missing data source?”
A simple “No” solved my problem.
Now that I am off the rocks, I will continue working on the cruise demo.
I still have the problem file if the Visio team wants to figure out why it hung.
Enjoy…
John Marshall… Visio MVP Visio.MVPs.org
john Visio MVP 