title: Programmatic access to Visio shape tooltip
body: <p>To avoid an <a href="http://xyproblem.info/" rel="nofollow">XY problem</a>, here's what I'm trying to accomplish: <strong>when a shape is selected, I want detail text about that shape to appear on the screen.</strong></p>
  
  <p>I first tried using Shape Data, but it supports only single-line name=value pairs. My detail information is an arbitrary, multiline text blob.</p>
  
  <p>My next thought was to used the shape's ScreenTip (aka tooltip) to hold the text data, then write some VBA code to handle the _SelectionChanged event. When a shape is selected I want to copy it's ScreenTip text into the text of another object (my details panel).</p>
  
  <p>I got the _SelectionChange event-handling working, but poking around the Selection object in the debugger I can't find any property of the selected object that exposes the ScreenTip information.</p>
  
  <p>Is Visio's programming API too anemic to support his kind of thing? Is there another way I might be able to do this? Is there another <em>tool</em> that might be better for this (preferably free)?</p>