Copying Visio Drawings Without A Loss Of Fidelity
Jun 29th, 2010 | By Christian Donner | Category: Information TechnologyCopying Visio 2007 drawings and embedding them into other documents can have startling effects. Lines can get routed differently, breaking a careful layout. Dotted lines can appear as solid lines, making it confusing to distinguish between different types of objects. There are 2 important things to know that can help avoid these issues.
- Use the Copy Drawing function in Visio, as opposed to the Copy function
Click on the Edit menu when nothing is selected to see the Copy Drawing option. Why would this make a difference, you may ask? I don’t know – but it does. See the following example.
Using Copy (Visio) and Paste (Word) results in a broken embedded Visio document
Using Copy Drawing (Visio) and Paste (Word) results in a correctly formatted embedded Visio document
- Modify the registry as outlined in this Microsoft Support article
Visio apparently replaces dotted or dashed lines with solid lines on purpose to reduce the size of the exported objects. This can be turned off in the registry:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Visio\Application] "MetafileDashLineAsSolid"=dword:00000000
Even better news: This process is no longer necessary in Visio 2010. Drawings are reproduced correctly when pasted into a Word document, even when only a subset of the objects is selected in Visio.
THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH!!! I have been looking for hours for a solution to my problem (copying from Visio into Work without losing the dashed lines – they transformed to solid lines during the copy/paste function). A very helpful and easy fix to a frustrating problem.
Using Visio 2010, I am still experiencing the same problem of dotted lines being displayed as solid lines when I copy OR Copy Drawing. If I double-click on the embedded drawing in Word, then I see the dotted lines, but as soon as I exit out of editing the Visio object in Word or try to print — it goes right back to displaying the dotted line as a solid line.
@Bill: did you make the registry change that is mentioned in my post?