Hi folks, Happy New Year and all that!

As an architect I spend a lot of time creating IT landscape roadmap, diagrams, etc; my primary tool is Microsoft Visio 2003. Visio is a powerful drawing tool and one of the features I always use is Layers. Unfortunately, layers are not exactly what they sound like. When I think layers, I think photoshop. You can draw stuff on a layer and bring it forward or back and use z-order property as you would expect. Visio layers are more like tags or categories that you attach to shapes so that you can quickly find all the shapes of a paticular category. Shapes themselves have a z-order, you can bring them forward and backward - not sure if you can access the z-order value itself.

So why am I telling you this!? Because I have a diagram with 24 layers representing 24 months of application change over time. Each layer has anywhere from 1 to 50 shapes that belong to that layer (month). All great and good as long you don't add anything or bring something forward or backward - otherwise layer hell!!! If you add an object, it is immediately place at the top of the z-order stack. The first time user of Visio may think that if they put it on layer "May2010", that it will be in front of layer "Apr2010" and behind "Jun2010" - WRONG! The shape's z-order has no correlation with the layer, it's just been tagged with the layer "May2010". To get it to actually be in the correct z-order, I need to do a sweep through my layers, starting with "Jan2010", select all shapes "Bring To Front", then "Feb2010", select all, "Bring To Front", and so on. Let me tell you, if you're changing stuff regularly, it's not much fun.

Anyway, that's all behind me now because I've created a nice little Visio macro called "ReorderLayers" in the stencil file on SourceForge. It relies on a simple convention of naming the layers that you want to automatically reorder to be prefixed with a number. By default it's three digits, e.g. 010-Jan2010, 020-Feb2010, 030-Mar2010, ... (I always number my layers by 10's initially so I can insert additional layers layer). Then you place the shapes you want on the appropriate layer, then run the Macro (i.e. from the menu: Tools > Macros > PaulsStencil > layers > ReorderLayers). This should reorder all the layers numerically, i.e. from 010, 020, ...

Enjoy!!!
Paul