Guidelines for Applying Styles to Shapes

Whether you're designing shapes for your own stencils or working with existing masters, using styles is an efficient way to format shapes. Microsoft® Visio® offers several techniques for applying and editing styles. The technique you use depends on whether you want to reformat all shapes that use a particular style, reformat the master itself and so all subsequent instances of it, or change the instances currently on a drawing page, as follows.

Techniques for applying styles to shapes

To change or reformat this	Do this
Appearance of all instances of a master currently on the drawing page as well as those you add later	Edit the drawing file's styles.
Appearance of a master in a stencil	Apply different styles in the stand-alone stencil.
Only the instances of a master on the drawing page	Edit the copy of the master in the document stencil.

When you define a style, you can modify the text, line, and fill settings independently (A).

In this section…

Reformatting Shapes on the Drawing Page

Reformatting Masters in a Stand-alone Stencil

Reformatting All Instances of a Master

Reformatting Shapes on the Drawing Page

You can edit a style to change the appearance of all shapes in a document that use the style. To do this, use the Define Styles command on the Format menu to revise the text, line, or fill attributes of an existing style. All shapes formatted with the edited style are changed.

For example, suppose that you're working with the Basic Flowchart Shapes stencil, but you want text to appear in 10-pt italic, Times Roman type. Shapes from this stencil are formatted with the Flow Normal text style. You can use the Define Styles command to change the style definition for Flow Normal to format text in the font you want. The new definition affects all shapes in the document to which the style is applied, as well as any new shapes you add that are formatted with that style.

A new style definition is saved only with the current drawing file. The stand-alone stencil and its masters are not changed, as the stencil file has its own style definitions.

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Reformatting Masters in a Stand-alone Stencil

You can reformat masters in a stand-alone stencil by choosing new styles, and thus reformatting any instances subsequently created from those masters. Unlike editing a style to reformat the shapes that use it, this procedure changes the definition of the master in a stencil and saves the changes to the stencil. Use this procedure to edit masters in stencils you use in many different drawings.

To reformat a master with a different style

1. Open the stencil file containing the master you want to edit.

• To make the stencil editable, click the icon on the stencil's title bar, and then click
• Edit
• on the shortcut menu. Alternatively, on the
• File
• menu, point to
• Stencils
• , and then click
• Open Stencil
• . In the
• Open Stencil
• dialog box, click the arrow next to the
• Open
• button, click
• Original
• , and then click
• Open
• .

1. In the stencil window, right-click the master you want to edit, and then click Edit Master on the shortcut menu to open it in the master drawing window.

1. Select the shape you want to modify, or subselect the shape you want if the master is a group, and then reformat the shape as you want it to appear.

• For example, on the
• Format
• menu, click
• Style
• , choose a text, line, or fill style to apply, and then click
• OK
• .

1. Close the master drawing window.

• When you are prompted to update the master, click
• Yes
• .

1. Make sure the stencil window is active, and then on the File menu, click Save. Or, click the stencil icon on its title bar and click Save on the shortcut menu.

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Reformatting All Instances of a Master

You can quickly reformat all instances of a master in a document without changing either the master or its style definition by editing the copy of the master in the document stencil.

By editing the copy of a master in the document stencil (A), you edit all of its instances on the drawing page.

To reformat all instances of a master

1. On the File menu, point to Stencils, and then click Document Stencil.

1. For each instance of the master that you want to reformat, right-click the master in the Document Stencil, and then click Edit Master on the shortcut menu.

1. In the master drawing window, reformat the master as you want.

1. Close the window and, when prompted, save your changes to see the effects on the drawing page.

Note This technique works only if the instances of the master retain their original formatting. Shapes to which you've applied a different style or local formatting are not affected.