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Although many people view Visio as a drawing tool, it isn't one, because it requires no artistic ability. It's more accurate to say that Visio is a diagramming tool for charts, diagrams, and drawings.
Like all software programs, Visio 2007 uses a particular terminology. You need to be familiar with the following terms before you begin creating diagrams and drawings:
- Drag and drop: The method Visio uses to create drawings. What are you dragging and where are you dropping it, you ask? You drag shapes and you drop them onto a drawing page.
- Shape: Probably the most important element in Visio. A shape represents an object of nearly any conceivable kind, such as a piece of office furniture in an office-layout diagram, a road sign in a directional map, a server in a network diagram, a box on an organization chart, or a bar on a comparison chart. Visio contains literally thousands of shapes. You can draw and save your own shapes.
 | - Master shape: A shape that you see on a stencil. When you drag a shape onto the drawing page, you're copying a master shape onto your drawing page, making it just one instance of that shape. Visio makes the distinction between master shapes and instances of shapes. The only time this distinction is important is when you begin modifying Visio to meet specific needs by creating your own shapes.
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- Stencil: A tool Visio uses to organize shapes so that you can find the one you're looking for. A stencil is nothing more than a collection of related shapes. If you want to create a cubicle-layout diagram for your office, for example, you use the cubicles stencil, which includes shapes such as workstations, posts, panels, work surfaces, storage units, and file cabinets. Stencils are displayed in the Shapes pane on the left side of the screen so that the shapes are always available while you're working.
- Template: A collection of stencils in addition to predefined document settings. A template is essentially a model for creating a particular type of drawing. A template defines certain characteristics of the drawing so that the drawing is consistent. For example, when you use a Visio template for a specific type of drawing, Visio automatically opens one or more appropriate stencils, defines the page size and scale of your drawing, and defines appropriate styles for things such as text, fills, and lines. You can change any of these elements, but the point of using a template is to maintain consistency throughout the drawing.
- Connector: A line that connects one shape to another. Perhaps the most common example of a connector is in an organization chart. The lines that connect the president to various groups in an organization and the lines that run through an organization are connectors.
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