I reader of one of my earlier posts, Copy Data from one Shape to Another ( see http://davidjpp.wordpress.com/2009/02/02/copying-data-from-one-shape-to-another/ ) asked how a cow can inherit the field number of from the field that it in. I think that this is just an example of how you can automatically update any Shape Data value from an underlying container, but I will use a cow in a field example anyway. This example uses VBA code, but should be good to use in any version of Visio since Visio 2000.