Trying to create an Entity Relationship Database from Excel using Visio Standard - excel

Question

I'm trying to use my company's software, Visio Standard, to create an entity relationship database using Excel. Usually the team has been creating this manually due to not having access to the Professional versions. With a mulitude of entities, the process is extremely tedious doing this one by one. I am trying to import from Excel to Visio without that pro version.
Theoretically the excel template would have Entity Name, Entity Structure (P'ship, Corp, DRE, Individual, ect.) and whatever else information needed to automatically populate into excel.
I have a background in VBA so that could be utilized, I just keep running into roadblocks due to the lack of tabs that the standard version has, including the main Data tab for import.
Is there any way I can import my data from Excel into Visio then run a code to convert it into shapes? What about my own custom template?
We make entity relationship diagrams often so one template would not work. We have a standard shapes & stencils that is used across the board, but the ERD is never the same. I thought I needed a template but I realized that I can't convert a personal template to a wizard or import an excel to the template that the template becomes quite useless.
#Surrogate My idea is that I want to pull the data from a template in excel to automatically create the ERD (or close to it) to save a large sum of time creating those entities through the shapes one by one. I think the template in Excel being so basic, with header columns for the Name of the Entity, Shape to use, hierarchy ladder; VBA does come into play pretty easily, just unsure how to mess around with that since I can't import excel into Visio through the standard version
#y4cine I am stuck because I cannot import data from excel in the standard version.
#TimWilliams I'm not capable of poaching to paying for the pro version, so regardless of the "fun" I would like to see if I could work around the pro version to do what the ERD/wizard can do, even if it requires a large VBA macro.

Answer 1

because I cannot import data from excel in the standard version
This example uses early binding.
In VBA you need to set a reference to the Excel Library.
It sets prop values in already existing shapes. The link being the shape ID.
If you rather need to draw new shapes, I' recommend using a master.
something like:
dim oMaster as master
dim oStencil as document
set oStencil = Application.Documents("myStencil")
set oMaster = oStencil.Masters("myMaster")
then inside the loop:
define some coordinates for x and y
set shp = activepage.drop(oMaster,x,y)
The function:
Public Function excelImport(filename As String) As Boolean
Dim xlsWorkbook As Excel.Workbook
Dim xlsSheet As Excel.Worksheet
Dim shp As Visio.Shape
Dim num_rows As Integer
Dim row As Integer
Dim shpID As String
Set xlsWorkbook = Excel.Workbooks.Open(filename)
Set xlsSheet = xlsWorkbook.Worksheets(1)
num_rows = xlsSheet.Range("A65000").End(xlUp).row
For row = 2 To num_rows
shpID = xlsSheet.Range("P" & row).FormulaR1C1
If Not shpID = "" Then
Set shp = ActivePage.Shapes.ItemFromID(CLng(shpID))
shp.Cells("prop.SoAndSo").Formula = Chr(34) & xlsSheet.Range("A" & row).FormulaR1C1 & Chr(34)
End If
Next row
xlsSheet.Application.Quit
Set xlsSheet = Nothing
Set xlsWorkbook = Nothing
excelImport = True
End Function