Where is shape availability documentation?

[dbuchanan]

New to Visio - (Visio 2003 std)
I discovered quite by accident that there are perhaps hundreds of
shapes available that are not shown on the provided stencils.
(I know that shapes are availble through third party sources, but I am
not referring to these now.)

I have done searches within Visio and found a subset of shapes of say,
Windows form design (I design software and knowing this would be
useful.) I have found (buttons, text boxes, combo boxes, buttons, spin
buttons, forms, datagrids, etc) But then if I want to find things such
as (status bar, progress bar, date picker, etc.) I cannot find them
because I do not know where this comes from or is stored. Where is the
documentation? Where is there some kind of catalog showing what is
available?

 

[Mark Nelson [MS]]

I would suggest starting with Help > Diagram Gallery. This gives a brief
summary of the drawing types. Then I would go to File > New > Choose
Drawing Type to review the templates that you can work with.

Many of the shapes are available in stencils attached to each template, but
there are a few additional stencils that you may want to browse through as
well. Look in File > Shapes at the list. Most of the ones not associated
with a template are under Visio Extras.

You can also search for shapes using the search box at the top of the Shapes
window. This will look for shapes across the whole product as well as
Visio's online shape database.