How to open embedded Visio files with only Visio Viewer?
- by Christopher Galpin
For some bizarre reason Visio Viewer seems incapable of opening vsd files when they're embedded within a (2010) Excel document:
However if I open the Excel document with 7-zip, browse to xl\embeddings, extract oleObject1.bin and rename it to a .vsd file extension it opens perfectly fine with Visio Viewer in Internet Explorer.
Since this opens fine on a computer with the full Visio installed, my guess is it's trying to launch Visio rather than IE. Is there something I can do to fix this? I've been scanning with Process Monitor and searching with RegScanner comparing a Visio-installed system to a VisioViewer-installed system and there doesn't actually seem to be any sort of registry value giving direction here... maybe it's just the nature of OLE.
(If it can't be fixed I'm okay with converting the extracted one to a .png or so to replace the embedded object, but the "solutions" I've found for vsd to image conversion are very poor or non-working, i.e. buggy code, code with Visio dependencies, or online services.)
