How to trickle down reusable shapes updates to diagrams

Question

I am creating my own custom shapes for some of my enterprise architecture works and thought of taking the stencil route, the question i have is if i am using custom shapes from my stencils in my visio diagrams, and later on if i go and update those shapes in stencils, does those change reflect back to all diagrams? Is this possible?

Answer 1

When you modify the masters in a document all instances of those masters in the same document will be updated. Shapes you created in other documents will not be updated because when you drag-and-drop from a stencil to another document the master is copied into the document.

If you are modifying masters using the automation API make sure you call Master.Open and Master.Close. If you don’t changes to groups and shape counts won’t propagate to instance shapes.