Microsoft® Office Visio® 2007 Inside Out

Exploring Shape Geometry

If you want to design your own shapes and add SmartShapes formulas, you need to understand specifically how the drawing tools operate on shape geometry. When you strip away the formulas and formatting, shapes are just geometry—that is, lines, and arcs—and that’s how Visio 2007 represents them internally. Every time you draw a new shape, Visio 2007 records your actions in a ShapeSheet spreadsheet for the shape. Every shape has a Geometry section in its ShapeSheet that defines each point that makes up the shape, as Figure 25-6 shows.

Figure 25-6. Every shape is described in the Geometry section of its ShapeSheet.

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Depending on the tool used to create a shape, the Geometry section can describe points ...