How to create a program on top of Visio?

Is it possible to make a standalone/independ开发者_开发知识库ent (from visio) program that is built on visio. Say, can i attach some of the design templates and visio drawing page on to my form?? Thanks

Visio supports VBA. With that, you can add all kinds of interactivity to your document.

And, you can embed visio in another program with the activex control.

Both of these methods require visio to be installed on the machine (if that's what you were getting at by the "independent" comment).

The Visio Viewer may or may not install the activex control or support VBA, I don't know.

There's a value stream mapping tool called SigmaFlow VSM that is an application built on Visio like you want to make. Basically the tool loads up Visio and strips out a lot of the Visio toolbars and puts their own UI in. Obviously it requires you have Visio installed.

There's a similar tool called eVSM that leaves the Visio UI in place, but provides a toolbar and templates and stencils for the purpose of building value stream maps.

I prefer the eSVM approach, where you end up giving the user the full ability to do whatever they want within Visio, while making the very specific task of Value Stream Map diagram creation easy.