Microsoft Visio 2007

Formatting Shapes in Visio

There are a variety of options and ways you can format the shapes in your Visio drawing. Creating a Visio drawing will help simplify a complex topic into an easy to understand drawing. If you add some formatting, you can make your drawing “pop” and make it crisp and clean for presentations or printouts. We’re going to use our brainstorming diagram we created in the previous tutorial and format it.

How to Format a Brainstorming Diagram

1. Open the brainstorming diagram. If you need it, you can download the Visio file here.
2. First, let’s change the shape of the New Website shape. Right-click on the shape and select Change Topic Shape.
3. Select Starburst and click OK.
   
4. Your shape is changed. Change each of the subtopics (Evergreen content, Social wildfire, and User submissions) to ovals.
   
5. Now, let’s change the fill color of each shape. For New Website, right-click on it, select Format then select Fill. Change your shape fill to a dark purple.
   
6. Let’s change the font color to white so it’s a little more readable on this shape. Click on the shape, then select the font color button in the formatting toolbar at the top. Select White.
   
7. Select each oval for the subtopics and change the fill color to light purple. Here’s a tip to quickly achieve this: Change one oval to light purple fill, click the next oval and press Ctrl+Y to repeat the fill. Select the next oval and press Ctrl+Y. This will color all three circles light purple. Your drawing now looks like this:
   
8. Select the Easy to write subtopic. Change the topic shape to rectangle.
   
9. Now, let’s change that rectangle by rounding the corners. Select the Easy to write rectangle, select the Format menu and click Corner Rounding.
   
10. The Corner Rounding dialog box opens. Select the level of rounding you desire and click OK.
11. Your rectangle is now rounded.
12. Select the Easy to write shape again. Click on the Format menu and select Line.
    
13. Select the purple color and click OK.
14. Now let’s change the format of the sub-subtopics to match the rounded rectangle we just styled. Select the Motivate submissions shape, hold down the ctrl key, then click on all of the other sub-subtopics until they are all selected. Right-click on one of the shapes and select Change Topic Shape. Select Rectangle and click OK.
15. Select the Easy to write shape. Double-click on the Format Painter button in the standard toolbar at the top (). Click on one of the unformatted rectangles. It will inherit the style of the Easy to write shape. Click on each shape until all of the shapes are styled the same way. Click the Format Painter button at the top to turn format painting off. Now, your drawing should look like this:
    
16. Congratulations! You’ve learned some of the formatting options for your Visio drawings. If you’d like to download a Visio file with this drawing in it, click here.