Finding the Style Explorer in Visio 2007 and Visio 2010
Friday, June 3, 2011 at 7:36PM
This post is about finding the UI elements that let you create or modify the Styles used in Visio. This is a powerful feature that is not widely used, but should be because it can save a lot of time in formatting documents. The method to enable Style Explorer is different between Visio 2007 and Visio 2010 so I’ve described both in detail below.
Styles in Visio 2007
In Visio 2007, there’s an easy way to see and edit the list of styles in a document.
First, by turning going on to the View Menu and selecting Drawing Explorer
You will see the list of styles in the Drawing Explorer
NOTE: The Styles node in the Drawing Explorer is available even if you have not enabled developer mode
And there are right-click menus available for these nodes
If you select Show ShapeSheet you’ll see the special ShapeSheet for the Style. Interestingly the Show Shapesheet command is available even if developer mode is not enabled.
Besides the Drawing Explorer, there is a specific Style Explorer that is available.
Unfortunately the Style Explorer is not an item visible on the View menu when looking at a document. As shows below you can see it is missing when viewing a document.
The Style Explorer is only available when you have a ShapeSheet window open (and usually this means running in developer mode )
If you select it, the Style Explorer will appear in the ShapeSheet window.
It has the same context menu items as we saw in the Drawing Explorer
Styles in Visio 2010
Surprisingly, the View tab on the Ribbon mentions nothing about the Drawing Explorer
You could customize the View tab on ribbon to add a command to show the drawing explorer or use the Developer tab to enable the Drawing Explorer
The Drawing Explorer still has a Styles node
And if you open a ShapeSheet window …
Then you will see the Style Explorer checkbox on ShapeSheet Tools / Design tab the tribbon
And just as before this will add the Style Explorer to the ShapeSheet window
How to enable Developer Mode in Visio 2010
Right click on any tab in the Ribbon and select Customize the Ribbon
Then you’ll be brought to the Customize Ribbon section of the Visio Options dialog box
On the Customize the Ribbon list on the right, under Main Tabs, simply click to enable the Developer Tab and then click OK. And then the Developer Tab will be visible.
Reader Comments (1)
Unbelievable how completely awkward and backwards Microsoft insists on being. It's 2010 and they're hiding simple tools and all it gives you is a "spreadsheet" tool to edit computation values. It's utterly outmoded and impossible for design folk to adopt. Meanwhile, almost any other visual design tool is completely at ease managing styles and layers. I'ts almost easier coding HTML than making a Visio drawing these days.