Microsoft Visio 2007

Managing Stencils

Now that you’ve learned about inserting shapes, adding text to shapes, and connecting shapes, we’re going to explore more advanced topics in managing your stencils. A stencil is the framework, the template, for adding predefined shapes to your drawing. In this section, you will learn about the stencil toolbar, creating a new stencil, saving it, closing it, and opening it. The stencil is the foundation for quickly being able to create a new drawing.

A stencil is a collection of shapes you can drag and drop into drawings in Microsoft Visio. The stencil contains shape masters which are used to drag and drop shapes into your drawings. For example, if you create a new drawing for a new Basic Electrical illustration, several stencils open:

Funamental Items is a stencil that contains multiple shape masters such as Ground, Chassis, Resistor, and so on. Visio contains dozens of these stencils, which in turn contain dozens of shape masters, giving you hundreds to thousands of built in shapes. However, Microsoft didn’t include every shape – nor every possible usage – built in to Visio, creating a thriving after market of free and paid stencils. In this section, you will learn how to manage stencils, how to create your own, and how to edit existing stencils.

Creating a New Stencil

As you begin to dive in depth into using Visio, you may find that the built-in stencils do not provide all of the shapes you need. Alternatively, perhaps you want to create a new stencil of shape masters from other stencils to create a “frequently accessed” stencil. Whatever your reason for creating a new stencil, it’s easy to create one in Visio.

Creating a new stencil can be very handy if you need a shape which is not available in Visio. You can use this if you have a specialized tool you use in a process, have a specific networking device you use in your network, have a uniquely drawn position for your organizational chart, or just need a shape Visio doesn’t offer. In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a new stencil to be able to add a shape as needed. You can also drag and drop predefined shapes into a stencil.

1. Click on the File menu.
2. Click on Shapes.
3. Click on New Stencil.
4. A new stencil is created in the Shapes panel:
   
5. Currently, the stencil is empty. In the next section, you will learn how to save your new stencil.

Saving a Stencil

Once you’ve created a stencil, you will want to save it so you can reuse it later. In this section, you will learn how to save a stencil.

1. Right-click on the stencil name and select Save as.
2. By default, your stencil is save into My Shapes under your My Documents folder. Name your stencil and click Save.
   
3. Once your stencil is saved, it will be renamed to the filename you just saved it as.