Modified shape behaves differently after saving it to my personal stencil

Question

I am working on a server rack diagram, and want to insert a KVM onto the rack. I could not find a suitable shape within the stencil provided so I decided to modify a switch from a different stencil and then save it to a stencil that I created.. I have no trouble modifying the switch as far as ungrouping little shapes Inserting 16 LED lights and then regrouping everything at that point it looks pretty good. The problem is. That once I save it to my stencil the mount points in the four corners don’t seem to work the same way as they do on the switch.. in fact they don’t even retain the same look. The lines get thinner and the shape gets rounder. When I mount it on the rack the mount points dont snap to the rack like they did before I saved it to my stencil. Why is this? How can I make it look and behave like the switch or a tray even? All I'm doing is adding 16 green circles and a red square to the face.

Answer 1

Ok. Yes the connection points seem to be broken after I ungroup and then regroup even when I take care not to touch them. Whereas the original switch snaps to the rack, the modified one slides to the left and right, attempting to align with the left or right side of the rack.

I'm not sure what I should see when choosing view connection points. connection points is a checkbox under the view menu, but I don’t see any difference whether it’s checked or not.. there is no option to insert a connection point. I have an option to insert and then connector But that doesn’t allow me to designate the former connection points as connection points. It just allows me to draw a line from one connection to another.

Answer 2

Hi John,

I have a stencil called Rack mounted equipment. I pull the switch out onto the page. What I want to do is use the shape size and connection points but I want to get rid of everything inside the box (the leds and Ports). Then I just want to add 16 circles as leds and a square power led and group them with the switch to make a kvm.

Answer 3

I will perform this check and report back.

Answer 4

You used one of the Visio naughty words "Ungroup". Unless you fully understand what you are doing, avoid ungroup. When you group shapes you can add extra relationships between the component shapes. Ungrouping destroys that. So....

What shape did you ungroup maybe we can figure out what you did and be able to add your embellishments to the original shape.

Answer 5

Hi Tony,

As per the description, it sounds like you're encountering issues with the connection points and shape formatting in Microsoft Visio after modifying and saving your custom stencil. Please correct me if I made any misunderstanding.

Could you please have a look about the general troubleshooting steps and let us know the updates so that we can work together to narrow down the issue and see how we can resolve it to insert a great customed shape into the rack diagram?

1. Check if the Connection Points are Retained during the grouping process.

When ungroup and modify the shape, check if some connection points are not deleted or altered. Select the shape and click View > Connection Points to make sure the connection points are still present and correctly positioned.

2. If the connection points were lost during the modification, re-add them based on the demand. Select the shape, go to Insert > Connection Point, and click on the desired locations to add new connection points.
3. If redo the actions still cause the shape change, could you please share us some more screenshots following your steps as we would like to help testing on our environment and see if it will show the same result on our side.

Here I opened a private channel for you where you can share me screenshots directly, kindly click:

Best Regards,

Mia