You can find often stencils of shapes on their web sites. Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) Visio MVPs are Visio experts who freely answer questions and offer solutions, tips, and suggestions, most often in the Visio discussion groups. If you are looking for some very specific or unusual shapes, you might try non-Microsoft providers such as these:Įquipment manufacturers If you are looking for shapes that represent specific pieces of equipment, you can often find them at the equipment manufacturer's website. Visio shapes are also created by people and companies outside of Microsoft. If you have an Internet connection, you can search the Microsoft Download Center for Visio shapes or stencils. These stencils have been vetted by Microsoft and are safe to use. These stencils, and all of the master shapes within them, are immediately available to use in the current and subsequent sessions. This will download the whole stencil in your My Shapes folder in a sub-folder named after the third-party provider. For example, searching for the word 'Tile' shows that it is also found in an online stencil, which can then be selected and downloaded. For example, searching for the word 'Tile' appears to mistakenly match with 'Square stone', however, an examination of the Keywords of the master shape reveals that it does contain the word 'tile'.Įditions of Microsoft Visio that have an online subscription also have the ability to search for shapes in a number of third party stencils hosted by Microsoft. The search also checks the Keywords of the shapes. You can drag and drop this master shape from there subsequently, rather than searching for it again.Ĭheck Shapes > More Shapes > Show Document Stencil to view the master shapes currently used in the document. When you select one of the found master shapes in the Local results, and drag it onto the page, a copy of the master shape is first added to the Document Stencil. However, if the option is changed to Any of the words (OR), then the 'Air Conditioner' shape will be matched because its name contains the word 'Air'. For example, 'Air Cond' will not find the 'Air Conditioner' shape when this is the selected option.

Although the search is not case-sensitive, it does match on whole words.

The default option for search is to search for text that matches All of the words (AND).

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