Visio® 2007 For Dummies®

Chapter 11. Creating Stencils, Master Shapes, and Templates

In This Chapter

• Creating and editing stencils

• Working with master shapes

• Creating and saving custom templates

You can use almost any software program as‐is successfully without ever taking the time to customize it. However, when you use the program often, customizing can save you valuable time and keystrokes. Like most software programs, Visio has many features you can customize, or personalize, such as stencils, master shapes, and templates. Perhaps it's more accurate to call these extensions because you can actually add things to Visio that make it more useful — for you.

Working with Stencils

Chapters 1 and 2 cover the basics of opening and using stencils. This chapter goes beyond the basics and tells you about Document Stencils, how to customize existing stencils, and how to create your own.

If the template you're using doesn't contain all the shapes you need and you know the required shape exists in a stencil not provided with the current template, choose File⇨Shapes to open additional stencils. Shapes in the Visio Extras folder don't generally appear in any of the templates, so this is the first folder you should check when you know a shape exists, but can't remember which template to associate with the shape.

Using the Stencil toolbar

As you work with stencils, use the buttons on the Stencil toolbar to work faster and with less effort. The buttons and their descriptions appear in Table 11-1 . To display the Stencil toolbar, ...