I am working on a Visio project where the client wants to be able to configure the font used in each document. These documents have many custom masters, but the user can add there own annotations too. Therefore, I needed to find a way to synchronise the fonts used in both cases. Visio has Themes and Variants, and some of these built-in settings use different fonts, but there is no way of editing the fonts used in each theme since Office 2010 ( see Create a custom theme). There have been many questions on the web about changing the default font used in Visio, which is currently Calibri, but there were no easy answers found. Visio used to use Styles rather than Themes, and these capabilities are still there, but the buttons are not displayed in the default ribbon. However, the Drawing Explorer window does show the Styles and their hierarchies.
In the slideshow above, the four shapes on the left have the No Style, Theme, Normal and None styles applied from bottom to top. The right-hand shape is just a freshly drawn rectangle. Applying different themes changes the appearance and font.
The Drawing Explorer window reveals how the styles are based on other styles, but you cannot see that Theme is actually based on No Style until you use the right-mouse menu option Define Styles… which opens a dialog. Here you can see that a style can include Text, Line or Fill settings. however I merely want to change the default font for the document, so the Text button opens a dialog where that can be changed.
The default formula in most cells in the ShapeSheet for these sections is =ThemeVal(), and this means that the value will be inherited from the active Design/Theme. If the Char.Font formula is replaced with just an equals sign then the value is inherited from the Theme style. Therefore, changing the values here will mean that the document version of the Theme style is customised, and the same desired font will be applied, whichever Design/Theme is applied.
One remaining issue is that a user may wish to revert to using the default font value set in the the Theme style, rather than one applied within the UI. This requires the formula in the Char.Font cell to be set to either =ThemeVal(), if the Design/Theme is required, or just =, once more. This can be done by re-applying the Theme style to a shape using the Style or Text Style buttons that can be added back into your customised ribbon.
A Visio List Shape is also a Container
Structured diagrams have been around in Microsoft Visio since 2010 and I have always known that list shapes are a specialized container shape, however it still came as a surprise to me recently that a list shape can simultaneously act as a container shape! There are a few examples of both container and list shapes…
Taking Visio Actions Rows to the limit
I recently (re-)discovered that there is a limit to the number of Actions section rows that will be evaluated for display on the right mouse menu of a Visio shape. I have not hit a limit (yet) for the number of rows that can be added to the Actions section … so why is there…
Custom Shapes in Visio in M365 and Web
Microsoft recently announced the ability to access the shapes in the document stencil whilst using Visio for Web … if you have a Visio Plan 2 license. So, I thought I would make it clear what that means for custom shape developers. There are now three licenses that provide the ability to edit Visio diagrams…
A Multi-Time Zone Clock for Visio
I wrote a post about making a clock face in Visio fifteen years ago, but a reader recently asked about displaying multiple time zones. Well, I have previously written about time zones in Visio, so I accepted the challenge to improve upon my earlier work. (more…)
Update any Visio ShapeSheet cell with External Data
When Microsoft introduced a new way of linking external data to Visio shapes in 2007, I initially bemoaned the inability to update anything but Shape Data row values, unlike the old database add-on that I had been using for 10 years. The new method, though, has many advantages over the old way, not least that…
Referencing Container Data in Visio
Microsoft Visio has a useful Structured Diagramming concept that consists of Containers, Callouts and Connectors. The first of these features make it possible for shapes to know what they are contained within, as a better option to grouping shapes together. Grouping can hide or break the grouped shapes smartness, so Visio provides two ways of…
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