Programming Visio

Visio is also highly customizable through a variety of interfaces. This document outlines those interfaces.

Customizing through templates, stencils and styles is well within the scope of any Visio user. Applying a little adventurous spirit to these options can harvest very rewarding efficiencies.

The ShapeSheet is a very powerful aspect to Visio, but it does require a little more dedication to master. The rewards however can be enormous and many very powerful Visio applications go no further than ShapeSheet programming.

Automation is the highest level of Visio customization and is generally outside the scope of the average Visio user. Commercial software developers are most likely to use Automation methods to provide the most sophisticated Visio solutions.

Templates
Templates are pre-configured drawings that can be used as the basis for new drawings. Any aspect that you routinely define when starting a new drawing can be more efficiently defined in a template. For example:

• Window size and position
• Page setup (size, scale, background)
• Styles
• Color palette
• Snap & glue
• Stencils

Stencils
Stencils are collections of master shapes that you can drag and drop on to your Visio drawings. Stencils provide a great way to standardize symbols and make shapes available between drawings. Stencils also provide a means to make global revisions to shapes in your drawings.

Styles
Styles are named collections of formatting attributes that can be applied to shapes and text in Visio Drawings. Applying styles to drawing elements ensures a consistent appearance and enables global revisions to be made across a drawing simply by editing style attributes.

ShapeSheet
The behind-the-scenes data view of your drawing. The ShapeSheet is a kind of spreadsheet view of all the data that comprises each shape in your drawing. The ShapeSheet varies with the nature and context of shapes and allows you to program intelligence and behavior into shapes.

Automation
Automation (once termed OLE Automation) is a means by which a program written in Visual Basic for Applications, Visual Basic, C/C++ or other another Automation-supporting language can incorporate the functionality of Visio by using it's objects which include it's drawing, masters, shapes, in fact almost everything that Visio has to offer.

Typically Automation is used to extend the functionality of Visio or to include Visio as a graphics engine in a program that you create yourself.

For more information go to Visio's own Solutions Development center http://www.visio.com/devweb