Chapter 21. Customizing Shapes and Solutions

If you think of Microsoft Office Visio 2007 as a visual toolbox rather than merely diagramming software, you’ll begin to understand how flexible it can be. If you have a business problem that requires a graphical or visual answer, Office Visio 2007 might be able to help. Shapes, documents, and even the Visio 2007 user interface itself can be customized. Your custom solution can be a simple tweak to an existing shape that you save as a new master, or a more elaborate, interactive program that uses Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), which is built into Visio 2007, or another programming language. Visio 2007 is a complete graphical development environment, or platform, that you can use to build visual solutions.

This book doesn’t tell you how to program with Visio 2007, which could easily take another 1,000 pages. This chapter does provide a place to start, however. With a deeper understanding of the Visio 2007 file format, you’ll know how to create your own stencils and templates, which you can distribute to other users if you want. This chapter also introduces the VBA window and points you to additional resources for taking advantage of this development environment.