VBA - Using .onAction on SmartArtNodes

Question

I am new to VBA and trying to use smartArt.Nodes to dynamically generate an organizational chart based on some cell data. I am able to generate the chart with no problems. Now, I would like to be able to display more details of specific nodes of the chart by clicking on them. I am aware that we can convert smartArts into Shapes with the Drawing Tools in Excel and then use .onAction on them like:

ActiveSheet.Shapes(name1).OnAction = "detail"

However, is there a way to achieve the same thing with smartArt.nodes using VBA? Say I have a node called "nodes1" I have tried:

nodes1.Shapes.OnAction = "detail"

or

Dim objShape As Shape
Dim SmartArtNod As SmartArtNode
Set objShape = ActiveSheet.Shapes(1)
Set SmartArtNod = objShape.SmartArt.AllNodes(1)

SmartArtNod.Shapes(1).OnAction = "detail"

and other combinations, but none of them seem to work... Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

Hard to prove a negative, but I believe this is not possible. Testing with Excel 2013, I can confirm the following do not work:

• Trying to trap the Selection of the SmartArt using Worksheet_SelectionChanged does not fire. If you change the selection from a cell to the SmartArt object, you will not get an event. You will get an event however when you lose focus on the SmartArt and go back to the cell.

• You can select a SmartArt object and then debug to check what is selected. The object is of type Object/Shape and the watch window indicates that it exposes an OnAction property, but attempting to set this property will throw an error.

I take the two issues above to mean that is will be very difficult (if not impossible) to get an OnAction event to fire from the SmartArt.