Creating an instance of Visio in vba when 2 versions are installed

user_10171153 0
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I have the below code to create an instance of Visio from Excel. It works on machines where I have a single version of Visio installed, but on some machines I have 2 versions (2010 and 2016) installed. On these machines it fails to run with the error "Method 'Visible' of object 'IVApplication' failed". When I check AppVisio its empty, and I am guessing it is because both applications are visio.exe. Is there a way to create the object from a specific path, or any way to createobject when 2 versions are installed?

Set AppVisio = CreateObject("visio.application")
AppVisio.Visible = False
Set docsObj = AppVisio.Documents
createobject visio vba
2 Answers

If you early-bind it by adding a reference (Tools | References) to the desired version then Diming your object as that type, you'll be guaranteed which version you're using.

Dim visioApplication as Visio.Application
Set visioApplication = new Visio.Application

However, that may not be the full solution if your company is mid-upgrade and some folks have the new version and some the older version. You'd get run-time issues on the machines that don't have your chosen version.

To solve that issue, you could create MyApp2010 and MyApp2016, each linking to the appropriate version of Visio, but that becomes a bit of a maintenance nightmare for you...

Early-binding does add loads of benefits like IntelliSense and turning most run-time errors into compile-time errors, so it's probably still worth it.

user_23444130

There are some options I believe.

Solution 1 (I would recommend this one). Install only Visio 2010 on your development machine (and uninstall 2016). It's safest to have the lowest version you want your app to run with on your dev machine anyways. Add a reference to Visio 2010's type library in Excel. Remove the reference to Visio 21016 type library. Visio versions are upward-compatible, so the code should run properly even on the machine with Visio 2016.

Solution 2. Use late binding. Remove the reference to the Visio from your excel project altogether and use only script-like access. In this case, you will lose auto-completion though. If your app is not a big one, that should not be an issue.

Solution 3. (if you want to run a specific version). You can start the Visio application from the program files (like any other executable), and then connect to it using "GetObject(...)" instead of "CreateObject(...)"

BTW, there is a better way to run Visio as invisible app (without flashing):

Set appVisio = CreateObject("Visio.InvisibleApp")

user_9291870
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