Microsoft Visio Templates and Stencils

Wednesday, Dec. 15 2004 | Author: JC

On occasion, I am called upon to build a network diagram or a flow chart of some sort, and I’m sure many of you have been, too. Most of you probably know that despite Microsoft’s reputation for building shoddy software, their Visio software is actually quite nice (though not nearly as cool visually as OmniGraffle for OSX). The only problem I have with it is the stencils. At least in my copy (granted, it’s Visio 2000), the stencils are *ancient* — the computers all have 5 1/4 floppy drives, and I don’t think there’s a rack-mounted server in the whole collection. So a few weeks ago when I was asked to build a diagram of our new load-balanced intranet system, I was a little stuck. Until I did a bit of searching.

Turns out there are lots of free Visio stencils out there, including official ones from Dell and Cisco, which made my diagram far, far easier to understand for everyone involved. So I thought I’d share. Some others we’ve found of interest have been for Citrix Metaframe (If you’re not familiar with that, Metaframe is basically a sort of software thin client… you can use the metaframe app or a browser and remotely access a desktop instance on a server. I’ve never been entirely sure what the real benefit of it is, I think it’s mostly used so remote users can have a single workspace no matter where they access from, and so sensitive data stays on a single secured server cluster) and for the Sarbanes-Oxley Audit, provided on Visio Cafe, which also has stencils for HP and IBM as well as a number of unofficial stencils from a variety of places.

I was unable to find a good source for Mac stencils, sadly. How about you guys? Are there any places you go for visio stencils that I left out? What sorts of things do you use Visio for?

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Category: General
Tags: Add-ons, MS Office, Office, Templates, VMS Visio

15 Responses for "Microsoft Visio Templates and Stencils"

Nick

December 15th, 2004 at 8:07 pm
1

Paul, surely you mean “icons” …stencils are actually a group of icons (or objects) to be used in a diagram. I have several IA stencils that I have collected over time. None of them really did it for me so I created my own stencil sets. I should post them sometime.
JC

December 16th, 2004 at 10:43 am
2

Hi Nick -
Actually, I did this one, not Paul. And yeah, I suppose that’s what I mean. I taught myself to use the software, so I probably don’t have the right nomenclature… stencils happened to be the term that kept showing up when I googled looking for icons, so I assumed that was Microsoft’s “official” name for them.
vanderwal

December 17th, 2004 at 2:36 pm
3

The Microsoft nomenclature for the individual objects in a stencil is shape. Icon is not a Microsoft term used with Visio. There seems to be two types of objects, shapes and connectors.
vanderwal

December 17th, 2004 at 2:44 pm
4

I just reopened Visio and found I need a correction. Shapes are what the objects are called, but the image representations of the shapes in the shaple selection toolbars are icons. Icons are the meta-representations of the shapes, which are meta-representations of processes, objects, widgets, etc.
John Marshall VisioMVP

June 2nd, 2005 at 7:54 pm
5

Visio is a software package created eight years before it was acquired by Microsoft. A stencil is a Visio file that contains a collection of shapes. The representation of shape in an open stencil is called an icon.
I keep a list of Visio stencils I have found on the web at
http://www.mvps.org/visio/3rdparty.htm
(suggestions are welcome)
Mir

January 6th, 2006 at 1:47 am
6

Hi,

Visio is quite new for me which I am going to use in my current project. I have got some idea about VISIO from this site. It was useful for me.

Regards,
Mir
john

January 30th, 2006 at 11:25 pm
7

You all did not answer the question at hand but instead looked at naming schemes. I ask does anyone know a good resource of MAC icons or stencils to be used in MS Visio?
Harry Davison

April 26th, 2006 at 1:19 pm
8

I agree, I haven’t found any good source for Apple stencils (XServe, XServe RAID, etc).
noco37

June 14th, 2006 at 5:52 pm
9

It’s not free, but you could try http://www.visiostencils.com/home/productline.asp?folname=AppleComputer&shapecount=24&mfg=AppleComputer

cheers!
Mahesh Desai

August 1st, 2006 at 9:02 am
10

noco, You have to register there for that. I guess you need to pay some $s too.
Tim

January 3rd, 2007 at 4:39 pm
11

Can anyone point me where to find a stencil of the rear view of the IBM xSeries 335 and 336 servers? I was able to get the front view from this website, Thank You very much! I haven’t been able to locate the rear view yet.
Rich

July 29th, 2008 at 11:27 am
12

I “faked” this by dowloading the .gif file from http://silverado.cc/shop/image.php?type=T&id=785

Then opened this in Paint and cut around the front of it.

You can then insert it into Visio as a picture.

Not ideal but I wasted too much time lookking around the net for a .vss and this works ok for me.

R./
Rich

July 29th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
13

W00t!

I found a .vss for Xserves here:

http://www.nag.ru/visio/a.html

It’s called “AppleComputer/AppleComputer.vss”

there is another .vss file here called “apple computers.vss” which DOES NOT contain the xserve shape.

R./
johan

July 30th, 2008 at 4:22 am
14

guys, i would like to create a visio diagram of our citrix infrastructure but i got no clue how to create this. if someone out there would like to share a visio diagram with me that would make my day. thanks in advance
James

October 30th, 2008 at 11:52 am
15

Thanks!