Microsoft Visio comes with a variety of prefabricated shapes designed to
represent components such as servers and routers in your network diagrams.
You simply drag and drop these shapes into your drawing to document your network. But sometimes, the component you need isn't available and you have to draw your own.
If you plan to reuse that component in other drawings, you can put it into a custom stencil you create.
Recently, I wanted to document the port assignments for my organization’s Cisco Catalyst 6509 switch, which contains three “blades” with 48 ports apiece. Each blade has four 12-port modules. I decided to draw just one 12-port module and put that shape into a stencil so that I could reuse it at any time. I’m going to show you how I did it so that you can see how to create your own custom stencils.
What is a stencil?
In Visio, a stencil appears as a
window with a lime-green background containing several prefabricated drawing
components, known as “masters.” Each stencil exists as a separate file with the
extension .VSS. If you installed Visio in its default location, the stencil
files are located in C:\Program Files\Visio\Solutions. Each subfolder in the
Solutions folder contains a category of stencils, which you will see when you
select File | Stencils, as shown in Figure A.
| Figure A |
 |
Creating your own
None of the Network Diagram stencils contained a master that was suitable for a 12-port module on a Cisco Catalyst 6509, so I drew my own using the basic drawing tools built into Visio, as shown in Figure B.
| Figure B |
 |
After completing the drawing, I wanted to turn it into a master. If you will notice back in Figure A, one of the choices when you click File | Stencils is New Stencil. When you choose this command, a blank stencil appears to the left of your screen with the default name Stencilx, where x is the sequential number of the stencils you create. To make my drawing a master in that new stencil, all I had to do was marquee-select the entire drawing (click to the left and above the drawing, drag to below and to the right of the drawing, and release) and then drag it into the blank stencil area and drop it there. The drawing immediately became a master, with an icon resembling its basic shape and the default name of Master.0.
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Posted by Bkelly on Tuesday, November 14 2006 07:49 AM