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About the Style Explorer Window

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The Style Explorer window provides shape developers with a quick way to determine which shape cells inherit from a given style, or the style from which a given cell inherits its value.

Styles are named collections of formatting attributes that you can apply to a shape. In Microsoft Visio, a single style can define text, line, and fill attributes as an efficient way to ensure consistency in your shapes. Additionally, you can also define a style for any one class of attribute (text, line, or fill) or any combination of attributes.

Unlike shapes to which you've applied formatting attributes individually, shapes that derive their formatting from a style not only ensure consistency but also respond better when they are created, moved, scaled, or rotated.

The Style Explorer window provides the information you need to understand better the implications of changes you make to shapes.

Note

Cell values that appear black in the ShapeSheet window are inherited; those that appear blue are local.

Using the Style Explorer window

To view the Style Explorer window, with the ShapeSheet window active, on the ShapeSheet Tools Design tab, in the View group, select Style Explorer. The Style Explorer window appears docked in the ShapeSheet window by default, but is an anchored window that can be docked, floated, or merged with other available anchored ShapeSheet windows, for example, the Formula Tracing window. The Style Explorer window contains a treeview display of all the styles defined in the current drawing.

Note

To get information about a style, you can right-click the style in the Style Explorer window to view its ShapeSheet.

The Style Explorer window provides the following information:

  • The cells that inherit their values from a selected style.When you select a style in the Style Explorer window, all cells in the ShapeSheet window that inherit from that style appear without hatching, while cells that do not inherit from that style appear lightly hatched.

  • The style from which a selected cell inherits its value.When you select a ShapeSheet cell, the style from which it inherits its value is displayed on the taskbar under the ShapeSheet window.