Microsoft Visio 2007

Working With Visio Drawings

Now we get to the meat of the tutorial where you get to become a Visio artist and begin working with Shapes. Shapes are the foundational elements of any Visio drawing and can be thought of as stencils. You can drop a stencil into a Visio drawing and then manipulate that shape to be whatever you want it to be – resize it, add text to it, connect it to other objects, change its color, and more. The stencil shape is just a predrawn object which you can use to achieve whatever your goal is for your drawing. Many times, you will create a Visio drawing and not change the shapes too much, but the capability is there to change them however you see fit.

In this section of the free Microsoft Visio 2007 tutorial, you will learn about stencil, how to insert them, connect them to other shapes, add text to them, and delete the ones you no longer need. In later sections, you will learn more advanced methods of editing and formatting shapes.

What Are Stencil Shapes?

Stencil shapes are predefined, predrawn graphical elements which can be dropped into a Visio drawing as an object. Visio comes with hundreds of these predefined elements to help you create your drawing. You can create your own stencils and also acquire stencil libraries for all sorts of objects. This is very useful if you’re creating network diagrams – we’ve been able to acquire libraries of objects such as specific manufacturer switches, routers, and other networking gear to create a realistic network diagram with actual representations of specific electronic gear models. This detail pays off when you’re asked to accurately diagram a network for others who will come after you.

In this section, we will learn how to use these pre-defined stencil shapes, insert them into your drawing, and the basics of managing the objects.

How to Insert a New Shape

Inserting a new shape is a very simple process. We’re going to show you how to insert a Visio shape using a workflow diagram.

1. Open Microsoft Visio 2007.
2. Click on New, select Business and select Work Flow Diagram (US Units).
3. This will open a new diagram in Microsoft Visio. We’ve insert two shapes already, and here is our third shape:
   
4. Select an object in the Shapes panel on left. In our example, we’ve selected Accounts receivable. Left-click on the icon and drag onto the drawing. Since we already have two objects, when we hit the center, it shows an automatic Snap to Dynamic Grid, in this case, we’re showing a work flow process so we want this to be aligned properly. Let go of the mouse button and your object is now part of the drawing.

You can repeat this process with any shape stencil on the left, dragging and dropping it anywhere on the drawing.