What are stencils

As mentioned earlier, we find the different categories stencils in the “Shape window”.

Depending on the template chosen while creating the document, the various stencils available are displayed in the “Shape window”.

A stencil is a collection of shapes that are connected to a particular “Visio” template.
The “Basic diagram” template under the “General” category provides three basic stencils, namely “Backgrounds”, “Borders and titles” and “Basic shapes”

To display all the shapes in a particular stencil, just click on that particular stencil.

The different shapes in a stencil are called model shapes.

When you drag a model shape from a stencil onto the drawing page, you place an instance, or rather, a copy of this model shape in the document.

The model shape remains available in the stencil and we can have more than one instance of this shape in the document.

Opening and Closing Stencils:

To close a stencil, right click on the title of the stencil and select Close from the drop-down menu.
It disappears from the stencil “Shape window”.
To open any other stencil in the “Shape window”, click on the “File” tab in the “Menu bar”, select “Shapes” from the drop-down menu and select the stencil that you want to open, from any one of the categories.
A second way, and perhaps the fastest way, is to click on the “Shapes” button in the “Standard toolbar”.

As you can see, we can open any stencil, from any category.

Moving Stencils

Just like any toolbar, we can also move the stencils window.
Click and drag on the title of the shape from the stencil window to the desired place in the application window.

You can change the size of the stencil by placing the mouse pointer over the edge of the stencil, and when it changes into a two-headed arrow, click and drag it until you’ve reached the desired size.

You can close the stencil by clicking on the X icon in the “Title bar” of the stencil window.
In the previous section of this lesson, we’ve seen how to re-open a particular stencil.

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