Subtitles of the Movie

Okay, so we have our functional but not exactly pretty process timeline here, and again let's imagine that we want to take this and leverage this drawing in a PowerPoint presentation that we're delivering to our work group at work. So again we would use the Edit, Copy, and then the Edit Paste special commands to ensure that everything goes off according to Hoyle. So we could either drag a Selection Rectangle around everything here and use the Copy command, or alternatively as I've been doing all along, we can open Edit and choose Copy Drawing. That's fine. Now let's open up PowerPoint, Produce A New Slide, we'll call this Timeline, I'll get rid of this text area down here, and we'll choose Paste Special. Now we're going to maintain the Microsoft Visio drawing object in this case, but instead of choosing Paste I'm choosing Paste Link. This is an important distinction everyone, and it's a decision that's not meant to be taken lightly. If we just paste in this object, we can double click it and actually edit it from here using the Visio tools. If the user doesn't have Visio installed on his or her computer, then it's just going to be a non-editable object. But again, the deal here with Paste Link is that you've actually created an umbilical cord between the inserted object and the source file, such that when we double click the object in PowerPoint, we will actually come back and open the source file. Now that can have problems. Basically if PowerPoint can't get to the original file, if you've moved the Visio file to another folder for instance, or if you've taken the presentation off site and you want to edit it, you'll be hosed. So be careful. What Paste does when we choose Microsoft Visio drawing object is literally copies that drawing into your destination application and there's no link. So if we make a change here in PowerPoint, that change with not be reflected in the source Visio file. By contrast, when we paste a link, we're making changes always to the source file only, and simply those changes are being represented here in PowerPoint. So this is an important skill, this Paste Special, in understanding the difference between linking and embedding. Note that you can do this between practically all of the office applications. All right, enough talking. We're going to paste a link here, and there's our processed timeline. Looking great. Now to prove that this works, I'm going to come back to Visio and I'm going to quit out of the application. I'm not going to save my clipboard data. So now we're strictly in PowerPoint. And let's decide that we want to edit this process timeline to say get rid of a milestone. We'll double click it and watch what happens. You see what happens? We're actually in Visio now. So if we zoom in, select a milestone and press Delete to get rid of it, save the file and then choose File, Exit, we will see now back in PowerPoint that that milestone is gone. Because what we have here is an active link from the source file to the destination. Now finally, let me come back to where that file lives. Let me see, I think I called that Timeline. I'm going to cut it from here, and we're going to paste it on the desktop. So we've actually changed the location of that file. Did that work? Let me come back. I guess it worked. There we go, Timeline dot VSD, that's what I wanted to see. So let's come back to PowerPoint, let's bring that application back up, and then let's double click the object. Well I guess it made a liar out of me, didn't it? It was able to resolve that file to my computer. Well you know, lab time is good because it allows us to test different things. Let me delete, or remove, the Timeline dot VSD and see what happens now. I'm actually going to empty the trash just to ensure that that file's gone. That's a pretty dramatic move on my part, I think you'll agree. So we'll come back to PowerPoint, we'll double click the object, and I'll be darned. It actually made a liar out of me. I don't know how it's getting to this file. Oh you know what? I'm so dumb, friends. It looks like this file is called Process Timeline, not just Timeline. Oh I'm such a dunce. I hope that you understood what I've been doing thus far. Let me come back here to our source folder, there's Process Timeline. Oh brother, I'm so embarrassed. Let me move this file out onto the desktop, and then let's see what happens when we come back to PowerPoint. Okay, well it did resolve it still to the desktop, that's great. Final thing I want to do with you now is take that Processed Timeline file and move it to the trash. I'm trying, Visio, to tell you, the 2007 applications are very intelligent. A lot more so than they used to be. There we go. Looks like once we've taken the file and moved it to the trash, we finally get the error that I've been trying to generate all along. And you'll see this, if the link doesn't work from the source document to where it's been pasted in, the linked file was unavailable and can't be updated. Well there you go, welcome to the world of troubleshooting and working with Visio in a real world environment.