Designing Custom Shapes for Distribution | Developing Microsoft Visio Solutions (Pro-Documentation)

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If you are taking the time to develop your own shapes, you probably plan to reuse them or distribute them in stencils and templates for others to use. The goal of good shape design is to create shapes that work the way users expect them to. Like any creative work, developing shapes is an iterative process that benefits from experimentation and review.

What works on your system may not work as well on someone else's system. Not all installations of the Microsoft Windows operating system are exactly alike. You can design more usable shapes, stencils, and templates for others to use if you know your users' hardware configurations. Even if you create shapes for only your own use, knowing the characteristics of your computer environment saves design time by helping you create shapes that work the first time.

On any given system, the speed of the processor or the amount of memory affect the usability of your stencils and templates. Shapes with many complex formulas recalculate and redraw more slowly than simple shapes and take up more storage. Be sure to test your stencils on all the systems your users might have.

Shape Design Process Guidelines

To ensure a professional shape solution, consider using the following design process guidelines:

Make notes about a shape's intended function. What requirements must it satisfy? How must it behave to meet those requirements? If the shape will be one of a collection in a stencil, how must it behave to be consistent with other shapes?
Draw a prototype of the shape and format it to look the way you want, and then experiment with the shape using the Visio drawing tools. How does the shape behave when you move it, size it, rotate it, or group it with other shapes? What happens when you lock parts of the shape? Which behaviors do you want to change?
Identify the ShapeSheet cells that influence the behavior you want to change. Which cells need custom formulas, and to which cells should the formulas refer?
Create one formula at a time and check its effect on the shape's behavior. Keep notes as you go, either on paper or in text blocks on the drawing that contains your prototype shape. If you're trying different alternatives, you might want to copy the shape each time you try something new and keep the copies, so you can return to an earlier version if needed.
Write Help for the shape, so your users will understand the shape's intended function.
Test the shape for usability by giving it to co-workers to see if the shape meets their expectations as well as your own.

When you know exactly what you want the shape to look like, how you want it to behave, and what formulas you need to accomplish what you want, re-create the shape from the beginning. This might seem like unnecessary work, but it's the best way to ensure that no obsolete formulas remain in ShapeSheet cells and that the shape itself is drawn and formatted cleanly.

Shape, Stencil, and Template Distribution Considerations

When you design stencils and templates for distribution, keep the following shape distribution considerations in mind:

The resolutions of different video systems If you design for the system with the lowest resolution and fewest colors, your layouts and shapes will likely appear even better on more sophisticated systems. However, a stencil designed for higher resolution or more colors probably won't look as good on a less sophisticated system.
The possible or likely output devices that a user might use to print your shapes Know the capabilities and limitations of your user's output devices. You should test your shapes by printing them on the output device you expect your users to have to make sure the lines and fills look the way you want.
Whether to copyright your shapes The stencils, masters, templates, and source code provided with Microsoft Visio are copyrighted material, owned by Microsoft Corporation and protected by United States copyright laws and international treaty provisions. You cannot distribute any copyrighted master provided with Microsoft Visio or through a Web-based subscription service, unless your user already has a licensed copy of Visio that includes that master, or your user has a valid subscription to the Web-based service, or you've signed an agreement that allows you to distribute individual masters to your users. This includes shapes that you create by modifying or deriving shapes from copyrighted masters.
You can, however, copyright your own original shapes.

To copyright your own shapes

Select a shape. On the Format menu, click Special.

Add copyright information as a final step in your shape development. Once you have entered copyright information in the Special dialog box, it cannot be changed in a drawing, stencil, or template file.