Embed Stencil in Visio Drawing

zweiss · September 02, 2021, 08:36:21 PM

Hi, I'm trying to embed a stencil within a Visio drawing permanently. I want to be able to send the drawing over email or something and when the recipient opens it, they'd be able to see that stencil and use it in the drawing. I don't want to just link it to the drawing and send both because eventually someone will move something into a different folder and that link will break and that other person wouldn't be able to use the stencil.

How can I do this?

Nikolay · September 02, 2021, 08:53:38 PM

Every Visio drawing already has an embedded stencil, it's called "Document Stencil".
You can open it by clicking a button on the ribbon.

in other words: it is not poossible.

zweiss · September 02, 2021, 09:25:39 PM

Is there a way to take a subset of the shapes under Document Stencil and/or organize that stencil in a way that it saves? For instance, can I move all my valve & sensor symbols (on a P&ID) above all of the rectangles, circles, etc. and will that be consistent for future users?

Surrogate · September 03, 2021, 03:56:05 AM

Quote from: zweiss on September 02, 2021, 09:25:39 PMFor instance, can I move all my valve & sensor symbols (on a P&ID) above all of the rectangles, circles, etc. and will that be consistent for future users?

If you mean built-in document stencil, you can resort all shapes into manually.

Nikolay · September 03, 2021, 11:34:53 AM

Unfortunately this customization is saved not in the drawing but in the user preferences as far as I know).
So when another user opens the same file the order and groping will be different (default)

I would simply say there is no option to embed a stencil.

Surrogate · September 03, 2021, 12:36:26 PM

Nikolay, you are right !

I send document to my collegue, there is master-shapes are re-ordered.

vojo · September 03, 2021, 04:38:43 PM

if other than document stencil, then the order of shapes in the stencil is consistent across users and has nothing to do with the drawing. If you pull a shape from a stencil, it is copied into the document stencil. If you change a shape (color, stretch, whatever) in the document stencil, it will not affect the shape in the real stencil.
The document stencil contains ONLY the shapes used in the drawing, so shipping that around or hoping that the shape ordering in document stencil is consistent is not a "big picture" view of things since it assumes there are no other shapes needed (conversely, if you only want to share a specific set of shapes, make a new stencil and send that to others).