Visio® 2007 Bible

Chapter 31. Creating and Customizing Templates

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Reasons to customize templates

• Creating customized templates

• Setting up the customizations you want

• Storing and retrieving customized templates

Visio comes with dozens of built-in templates for many different kinds of drawings and diagrams. Visio Standard includes about two dozen templates, whereas Visio Professional offers more than 60. If the built-in templates don't have what you need, additional Visio templates are available for download from plenty of web sites, some of which are listed in Chapter 40. Even with all these templates at your disposal, unique requirements can lead you to customizing a built-in template or creating your own.

If you're reading this chapter, no doubt you already appreciate the power of Visio templates. By customizing templates to your specific needs, you can benefit even more—for example, an environment set up to simplify the construction of a unique type of drawing, settings that conform to your organization's standards, or perhaps your preferred combination of settings, toolbars, and windows. Just by creating a drawing based on a customized template, anyone in your organization can obtain the right paper size, scale, and other page settings; a set of stencils, whether built-in or customized; any number of standard drawing pages, including backgrounds; pre-populated shapes, such as your company logo; and even the Visio windows you typically use docked just where you want them.

There's no need ...