Joanna, CKO

It’s been a while – perhaps even a couple weeks – since the last tip-of-the-week. More on why I’m so busy later.

One thing that I’ve been up to lately – being busy and all – has been some clever use of the document stencil. And, in other cases, not-so clever use of stencils. The latter leads to sighing and wanting to put my fist through the other side of my laptop.

Let’s say you need to raise the fidelity of your wireframes. Either you need to match a graphic design that’s been established (because what graphic designer is going to mock-up your 300 wireframes?) or you decided today that you’d like to make all your submit buttons pink. It could happen. You could be inspired by CutewithChris.

So, it all depends on how you put your buttons in the document. Did you draw them out individually or use a shape from a stencil?

Tip 1: Faithfully using shapes from a stencil means you don’t have to punch your fist through your screen later.

Assuming you’ve used the shape, you might think to yourself that editing the shape in the stencil would update it in your whole document. While this notion has a certain logic to it, remember that this is a Microsoft product that we’re dealing with here.

Tip 2: Change your stencils all you want. It’s not going to do anything in your document unless you’re changing the Document Stencil

To change a shape in your document, you’re going to need to change the Document Stencil. Because it’s also not so easy to find, I’ve included a screenshot of the path to open the Document Stencil. Unlike your regular stencils, the Document Stencil is always ready for editing. It’s like that was its purpose in life.

Now, find that square, button or whatever that you want to change in your whole document. Right click it and pick “Edit Master Shape.” Make the changes you want to that shape. It can be anything: change the font, make it bigger, or even pink. Close that window in the top right, and Visio will ask you, “Update ‘shapename’ and all of its instances?” Yes!

Every spot where that shape was used will be updated. Or, not. If they’re not changed, you can hunt through the Document Stencil for another version of the same shape. If you can’t find what you need to update, you didn’t use your stencil faithfully.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 14th, 2007 at 12:39 am and is filed under Visio-ing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.