Today I needed to create a shape that was constrained to 90° increments of rotation.  In most CAD programs it’s easy enough to turn on Ortho Mode when you’re drawing a shape that should fit such a constraint, but Visio doesn’t offer that drawing mode, and even if it did it wouldn’t solve my particular problem: I need a shape that that can only be rotated to be orthogonal to the paper’s edge, not a drawing mode per se.

An easy solution presented itself in the BOUND shapesheet function (details online at Visio 2003 SDK Documentation:BOUND Function).  Here’s the function I actually put in the shape’s Angle cell: 

BOUND(, 0, FALSE, 0 deg, 0 deg, FALSE, 90 deg, 90 deg, FALSE, 180 deg, 180 deg, FALSE, -90 deg, -90 deg)

Works like a charm….