Visio® 2007 Bible

Chapter 33. Creating and Customizing Shapes

IN THIS CHAPTER

• What makes Visio shapes smart

• Understanding shapes and masters

• Creating and editing masters

• Drawing shapes and masters

• Controlling how shapes and masters glue to each other

• Customizing how shapes behave

• Customizing shape data assigned to shapes

• Working with shape data sets

Whether you use shapes only from the built-in Visio stencils or craft highly specialized shapes unique to your organization, you can modify shapes in many ways—change their appearance on a drawing, make them behave differently, assign special behaviors to them, or edit the data they contain. If you plan to use a customized shape frequently or on more than one drawing, creating a master of the customized shape enables you to reuse that shape by dragging it from a stencil onto any drawing page.

For customized shapes, Visio drawing tools and Shape Operation commands help build just the shape you want, whether it is an open path or an enclosed area—a shape that acts like a line or a box with two dimensions. You can draw geometry from scratch with Visio's drawing tools, but it's often easier to build customized shapes by starting with existing shapes or objects from other applications as the basis for customized masters. What's more, if every instance of a shape on a drawing carries the same flaw, the fastest and easiest way to correct them is by making the changes you want on the master that spawned all those instances.

This chapter explains the difference between shapes ...