Microsoft® Office Visio® 2003 Inside Out

Creating Text Fields to Display Information

You can insert a placeholder called a field into text that displays information such as dimensions, dates, and times. You can insert a field to show the date and time a drawing is printed, a shape’s angle of rotation, or the result of a formula you write. Visio tracks a great deal of information in the form of shape and document properties, and this information is available to you to display automatically when you insert a field. Some Visio shapes already include fields, as Figure 4-31 shows. For example, title block shapes that display file name, date, and time or a dimension line that displays shape width can do so because that data is contained in a field. Fields are automatically updated when you ...