Microsoft® Office Visio® 2003 Inside Out

Working with Color in Visio

Veteran Visio users will be glad to know that starting with Visio 2002, the product now supports 32-bit color, after a fashion. The Visio engine reserves the first 24 bits to specify 16.7 million colors and uses the remaining 8 bits to handle transparent colors, a new feature. This section provides additional background information about color management.

How Visio Applies Color to Shapes

You can apply color to a shape using either the Visio color palette or a custom color that you define. There is a distinct difference in how Visio tracks the two, and if you’re designing your own shapes or writing ShapeSheet formulas, you need to know the difference. Visio can record a shape’s text, line, and fill colors as an index ...