Microsoft® Office Visio® 2007 Inside Out

Understanding Shape Geometry

You can create most Visio 2007 diagrams successfully without a detailed understanding of how shapes work. However, if you want to create your own shapes or revise an existing shape, your task is easier if you know what you’re dealing with. This section breaks shapes down into their geometric parts, explains shape vocabulary, and explains why shape geometry is useful to understand. If you remember your high school geometry, you have an advantage, but even if you don’t know a vertex from a vortex, you’ll learn some practical techniques for getting shapes to look and act the way you want.

Visio 2007 includes many terms for describing the vector-based geometry that underlies shapes. If you reduce any shape to its simplest, ...