Chapter 23. Defining Styles, Patterns, and Colors

If you open a Microsoft Office Visio 2007 template and drag Office Visio 2007 master shapes onto a page to create a diagram, you typically don’t need to think much about styles, patterns, colors, or themes. Almost everything is formatted for you—styles are already included in the template, and using the new themes in Visio 2007, an instant theme is only a click away. If you’re not content with the options Visio 2007 provides, however, you have a lot of leeway to customize, as this chapter describes.

When you want to change the way a shape looks, you probably click a formatting button. Although themes give you a faster way to consistently format all the shapes in a diagram, professional shape designers need to understand style theory as well. What if a formatting button doesn’t include a satisfactory pattern or the exact color you want? This chapter goes inside Visio style theory and explains how to customize styles, patterns, and even colors and color palettes.