Color Fill

[JAD]

Filling any of the Visio shapes is easy. However, if I create a shape through
a conbination of using the line tool then the circle tool then the irregular
line tool and the shape is totally enclosed, I have not found a way to color
the shape. Am I missing something..... Any help would be appreciated. Thank
You

 

[John... Visio MVP]

Filling any of the Visio shapes is easy. However, if I create a shape
through
a conbination of using the line tool then the circle tool then the
irregular
line tool and the shape is totally enclosed, I have not found a way to
color
the shape. Am I missing something..... Any help would be appreciated.
Thank
You

A little surgery is required.

If this is not a grouped shape, open the shapesheet for the shape and look
for the Geometry sections. You should find that the Geometry section(s) will
have a cell called NoFill and has a value of true. (This will be the first
cell in the Geometry section). Change the value to False.

John... Visio MVP

 

[WapperDude]

Adding to what John mentions, are the various segments one continuous piece?
It's quite easy to unintentionally deselect prior segment when adding a new
segment. The ends will look overlapped, but won't be one continuous piece.
The 1st cure is to select everything, then go to menu bar > shapes >
operations > join. That should give you a single, contiguous shape which can
be filled. It that fails, then somewhere, there are two line ends that
weren't perfectly aligned and overlapped. That must be corrected before the
join command will work. Most easily fixed by setting the snapping to shape
vertex only.

HTH
Wapperdude

 

[John... Visio MVP]

Actually, you can create a pair of parallel lines and fill the space between
them.

Fill is slightly complicated. A shape can have several Geometry sections and
each of these can be filled or not filled. For example, a doughnut shape can
be be two Geometry shapes describing circles or one Geometry shape
describing two circles. You would suspect that with two geometry sections
for a doughnut, the one forming the hole would have a NoFill of true, but it
is not. So filling shapes can get confusing.

John... Visio MVP

 

[WapperDude]

Yes, that's true. But it's more slight of shapesheet, an illusion! The
basic principle of fills is that only a contiguous shape can be filled. The
donut case uses two circles, both are contiguous. Your parallel line example,
or even a shaded line with a single line showing, requires a contiguous shape
to be filled. The filled shape has the lines turned off, the 2nd geometry
section draws an additional line that overlaps one, two, or even 3 of the
filled sections sides.

But, in all cases, if the shape, or perhaps, more accurately, a region,
isn't enclosed and contiguous, it won't fill.

Wapperdude

 

[WapperDude]

I've illustrated some of what John and I just discussed: Fun with Fills on
Visio Guy's forum site:
http://visguy.com/vgforum/index.php?topic=1186.msg5109;topicseen#msg5109

 

[WapperDude]

After posting, I ran across a better entry on fills, by JunetheSecond, also
on Visio Guy's forum site:
http://visguy.com/vgforum/index.php?topic=1183.msg5102#msg5102. As I was
looking thru it, I realized that to have a filled shape doesn't really
require that it be contiguous. Not sure where / how I picked up that
mis-information. Basically, it looks like as long as the shape selection box
exhibits both height and width not = 0, then, go into the shapesheet, and in
the Geometry section, set GeometyX.NoFill = false, where X is usually 1, but
represents the geometry figure of interest. Visio will fill the shape,
bounded by the drawn lines, and then a linear interpolation between the end
points.

Wapperdude