Visio 2010 – Custom context menus

You’ll have to forgive the poor menus analogy, but I get bored with the same old pictures…

Anyway, on with another new feature in Visio 2010 – Multi-level custom context menus.  The current and previous versions of Visio have allowed you to add custom menu items to the context menu of pages and shapes and if you haven’t done so yourself, you only need to right-click on some of the built-in shapes such as the ‘Flowchart shapes’ shape (in the Basic Flowchart Shapes stencil) to see them at work.  One limitation, however, has been the inability to group the menu items into any kind of hierarchy.  Basically, all menu items that you add, get placed at the top level.  Visio 2010 changes that…

How it works in 2007

In Visio 2007 if you want to add a menu item to your shape you do the following:

1  Select your shape and click Show ShapeSheet

2  With the ShapeSheet visible, select Insert / Section…, check the Actions checkbox and click OK

3   Scroll down to the new Actions section, select the Action cell and click Insert / Row.  Now populate the cells as below

4  Close the ShapeSheet and right-click on your shape which should now look something like this

Enter 2010

So the process for 2010 is basically unchanged, but what’s new is an Actions cell called FlyoutChild.  This means that you now need to add three rows (as per item 3 above), one for the parent menu item and two for the child items.  The Action cell for parent can remain blank as it doesn’t actually do anything.  After editing the cells you should end up with something like this:

… with the new FlyoutChild cells, at the right hand end of the section, set as follows:

So, finally, what you get in the context menu itself is this, a logically ordered layout that doesn’t clutter the initial view: