Questions similar to this appear on the Bentley Discussion Groups. These appeared in the VBA discussion group.

Q

• How can I create a bullet presentation or bullet chart using MicroStation?

A  The Bullet Chart VBA project answers those questions.

However, understand that, just as Microsoft Word is not a CAD tool, neither is MicroStation a word processor. If you want to fancy-format a lot of text then there are more capable, and less costly, tools designed for that job.

Bullet Chart

Bullet Chart is a freeware utility for MicroStation. The Bullet Chart macro should work with MicroStation CONNECT and with MicroStation V8i.

Bullet Chart shows a dialog (VBA UserForm where you write a number of sentences in the VBA Chart Contents ListBox.

Bullet Chart Form

The Bullet Chart form (VBA UserForm) provides a simple user interface (UI). Its controls let the user choose a bullet type (symbol, alpha or number) and write some words in the ListBox. The Place Bullet Chart button is a command that starts a primitive class (clsChartCreator). After you press that button, the generated chart is stuck to your cursor in MicroStation. Move the cursor to the desired location and datapoint to place the chart.

The chart is created and sized using the active text style.

Bullet Chart Class

The clsChartCreator VBA class implements the MicroStation IPrimitiveCommandEvents interface. You will find that interface documented in VBA help, along with examples.

clsChartCreator creates a DGN CellElement. The visible components of that cell are text elements: one for each bullet symbol and one for the text obtained from a row of the ListBox.

Bullet Chart Project

You can download the Bullet Chart Project and use it: you don't have to be a VBA whizz. If you're interested in viewing or modifying the code, the project is not locked. You can open it in MicroStation's VBA Interactive Design Environment (IDE).

Bullet Chart License

The VBA project is freeware. It is not intended for any particular purpose: use at your own risk. You can use the project for any purpose private or commercial. You may not sell the product. You may not purport to be the inventor or designer of the product.

Download VBA Bullet Chart Project

The Bullet Chart macro should work with MicroStation CONNECT and with MicroStation V8i.

The above code is available in this MicroStation VBA project. Unpack the ZIP archive and copy BulletChart.mvba to a location where MicroStation can find it. A good place to copy it, if you're using MicroStation CONNECT, would be ..\Organization\Standards\macros. To start creating a bullet presentation, enter the following into MicroStation's keyin dialog …

vba run [BulletChart]modMain.Main

Questions

Post questions about MicroStation programming to the MicroStation Programming Forum.