Visio keeps a record of all of the types of shapes in your drawing in the “Document Stencil”. You normally don’t use this stencil, but Visio keeps shapes in here of every type that have ever been on the drawing. It keeps shapes in here even after you’ve deleted all uses of them in the drawing. This can cause problems:

• It makes the .vsd file size larger than it needs to be,
• Keeping obsolete versions of GunnShow shapes in here complicates using new versions. If you try to use a new version of a particular shape that has changed recently, and you have an older version of the shape in the Document Stencil, then when you drag the new shape onto the drawing or copy & paste one, Visio sometimes uses the old obsolete version of the shape out of the Document Stencil instead of the new one! This can be very annoying.

For the above reasons, it’s a good idea to occasionally clean out the Document Stencil of any old shapes that you’re not using any more. There are a couple of ways to do this, documented here under “Remove unused shapes from the local stencil”. We recommend the manual option 2, which we’ll detail below:

First open the Document Stencil from the Shapes window just like any other shapes stencil by Shapes > Show Document Stencil. Here we show GunnShow with the FluidNetworkTemplate drawing having just been opened, with the Document Stencil open on the left:

Now, let’s say I want to start creating my own drawing, so I’m starting with the FluidNetworkTemplate and I’ll delete all the shapes I don’t want to start with from the main drawing. I’ll delete everything except the Network Config box. Note that even though I deleted all the nodes, links, fluid state & config boxes, etc, their master shapes are still in the Document Stencil:

Next, I delete all of the unused shapes out of the Document Stencil by right-clicking on them and selecting “Delete Master”. I’ll delete all save the Network Config box. Now I’m starting my new drawing with a nice, clean Document Stencil:

If you try to delete a master shape from the Document Stencil that is still being used in the drawing, Visio will alert you with a pop-up message. In this case, do not delete the master shape unless you also intend to delete all used instances of it on the main drawing: