Working day-to-day

What the assistant works on

Vizspect gives the assistant a fixed set of tools that act only on the Visio document you have open, the active one. It can read that document’s pages, shapes, text, positions, and styling, and render pages to images so it can “see” the drawing and place things accurately. It can’t browse your files, your email, or the web through Vizspect, and it doesn’t touch your other open documents.

Because it always works on the active document, make sure the figure you want is the one in front before you ask.

Co-editing: take turns

You and the assistant can work the same drawing. The assistant re-reads the current state before every change, so your hand-edits aren’t clobbered, and destructive edits are guarded (below). The one rule: take turns. Visio is single-threaded; if a tool call arrives while you’re mid-edit, the server waits briefly and retries, but it’s smoothest to let one side finish before the other starts.

Undo, and guarded deletes

Every change is an ordinary Visio action, so Ctrl+Z undoes it (a related set of edits usually undoes in one step). Deletions are guarded: removing a shape confirms its text first, the last shape on a page is protected, and a burst of deletions auto-saves a backup page first; see Troubleshooting.

Saving and export

The assistant saves or exports only when you ask, and only within the document’s own folder or your user folder; it can’t write files to arbitrary places on the machine or network.