Working with Color in Visio 2007
Veteran Visio users will be glad to know that starting with Visio 2002, the product now supports 32-bit color, after a fashion. The Visio 2007 engine reserves the first 24 bits to specify 16.7 million colors and uses the remaining 8 bits to handle transparent colors, a new feature. This section provides additional background information about color management.
How Visio 2007 Applies Color to Shapes
You can apply color to a shape using either the Visio 2007 color palette or a custom color that you define. There is a distinct difference in how Visio 2007 tracks the two, and if you’re designing your own shapes or writing ShapeSheet formulas, you need to know the difference. Visio 2007 can record a shape’s text, line, and fill colors as an index to the color palette or as a specific RGB (red, green, blue) value. The numbered colors that appear in the Text, Line, and Fill dialog boxes refer to indexed colors, as Figure 23-24 shows. If the color at a particular index changes—which happens if you edit the color palette or if you copy the shape into a document that uses a different color palette—the shape can change color.
Figure 23-24. The default, indexed colors in a Visio 2007 diagram appear in the toolbar palettes and as the numbered options in the Color lists of the Text, Line, and Fill commands.
Visio 2007 also tracks color as specific RGB values. If a user applies a theme or chooses a custom color from the Colors dialog box, Visio 2007 records the exact color as a formula that specifies the RGB values, as Figure 23-25 shows. A similar formula can be used to specify colors as HSL (hue, saturation, luminosity) values instead. These formulas appear in the ShapeSheet window for cells having to do with color, such as the FillForegnd cell of the Fill Format section and the LineColor cell of the Line Format section.
Figure 23-25. Visio 2007 records custom colors and theme colors in the ShapeSheet window as exact RGB values, as the formula in the FillForegnd cell shows.
Note
With the transparent fills and shadows in Visio 2007, you can create shapes with see-through color. Where two transparent shapes overlap, their colors mix the way you would expect them to. You can vary the level of transparency, from fully opaque to fully transparent. However, you can’t make a shape’s lines transparent, only the fills.
Editing the Color Palette
You can edit any of Visio 2007’s indexed colors so that a different color appears at that index with the Color Palette command, as Figure 23-26 shows. Perhaps you want to use your company’s exact corporate blue in your diagram, and you would like it to appear in the toolbar color palettes for easy access. That’s a good reason to edit an indexed color, but remember that your changes affect only the diagram you’re working in. If you copy a shape formatted with the new color to a diagram without an edited color palette, the shape inherits the color assigned to the index of that document.
Figure 23-26. With the Color Palette command, you can edit the color palette associated with a Visio 2007 drawing file.
To edit the indexed colors that appear in a diagram, follow these steps:
1. | Choose Tools, Color Palette. |
2. | |
3. | Click Edit to open the Edit Color dialog box. |
4. | Choose one of the basic colors or define a custom color, and then click OK. The new color appears in the Visio 2007 color palette at the selected index. |
5. | In the Color Palette dialog box, click OK. Visio 2007 changes the color of any shapes formatted with the edited index color. The new color is displayed in the Color lists of the Text, Line, Fill, and Shadow dialog boxes. |
Changing or Restoring the Color Palette
You can use a different color palette altogether in a diagram or restore the original Visio 2007 colors. Maybe you’re creating Visio 2007 diagrams that will be copied into a Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheet (or vice versa). For better compatibility between programs, you can use the Excel color palette in your Visio 2007 diagram. Visio 2007 includes a couple of built-in palettes, or you can copy a color palette from one Visio 2007 diagram, stencil, or template file to another Visio 2007 file.
To use a different color palette or restore the default Visio 2007 palette, follow these steps:
1. | If you want to copy the palette from one Visio 2007 file to another, open both Visio 2007 documents. |
2. | In the diagram you want to change, choose Tools, Color Palette. |
3. | In the Copy Colors From list, select the palette you want to use. Visio 2007 lists any other Visio 2007 files that are open as well as the built-in palettes. |
4. | Click OK to add the new palette to the diagram. Make sure to save your changes. |
Troubleshooting: When you copy shapes to another Visio 2007 drawing file or Microsoft Office document, they change colorLike the attributes of a style, the definition of a color can be overridden when shapes are copied between Visio 2007 and Microsoft Office 2007 documents. If the new document uses a different color palette, it can override the colors used by your shapes. Visio 2007 uses the same color palette as other Microsoft Office programs, but conflicts can occur—particularly with Microsoft Office PowerPoint. Here are some options for fixing the problem:
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