Microsoft® Office Visio® 2007 Inside Out

Merging Shapes to Create New Ones

Sometimes the easiest—or only—way to create a shape is to draw several shapes and splice or merge them to get the geometry you want. Using the shape operation commands shown in Figure 22-17, you can build new shapes out of the geometry of existing shapes. Shape operation is a loose term for the commands on the Operations submenu of the Shape menu.

Figure 22-17. With the shape operation commands, you can create merged shapes.

In general, the shape operations work by merging the geometry of several shapes to create one new shape or by splitting out sections in cookie-cutter fashion to create several new shapes, ...