Microsoft® Office Visio® 2007 Inside Out

Mastering Visio 2007 Documents

Behind every shape, template, and solution in Visio 2007 is a file format that makes customization possible. If you want to create your own stencils or customize templates, you need to understand this fundamental fact of Visio 2007 life: All Visio 2007 files have the same format, and that format includes a drawing page and a stencil. That is, every drawing page has a stencil, and every stencil has a drawing page. The file name extension determines what you see when you open a file. That is why when you open a stencil (.vss) file, you typically don’t see the drawing page, or when you create a new drawing (.vsd) file without a template, you don’t see a stencil.

Here’s a little experiment you can try to see how this ...