Visio creates new document shapesheet cells that masters refer to!

[Visisthebest]

I am sharing this because I was not aware of this behavior in Visio.

For shape data lookup lists that are used in a lot of shapes, I store them centrally in the document shapesheet. Also because I want to standardize these lookups across the pages in a document.

What I did not realize is that if these user rows are not in a (new) document, when you drop that particular shape the user row + contents (the lookup list semicolon-separated) are created in the document. Actually this goes further, if you drop another shape from the same stencil, one that does not refer to a user row in the document, that row still gets created!

I did not realize Visio was keeping track of this and adding these doc user rows automagically!

Please see attached sample to observe this behavior.

(the user row actually is not removed when the shape drop is undone, so the entirety of this behavior is something to be aware of)

[Yacine]

I'm using this behaviour for many years now.
It prevents me from having to write code to add missing fields.
By the way, it works for the page as well.