View source for Visio Stencils

This is a bit of an odd one, but it's proven very useful to me when planning where to put all your hardware, i.e. which rack, which RU etc.  So you can get a lot of free Visio stencils from the various hardware vendors, such as Dell, Cisco etc.  The ones in question, are realistic representations of the devices, with real device dimensions etc.  You can find a lot of them at [http://www.visiocafe.com Visio Cafe].

You can also get stencils of racks, which have anchor points to allow you to attach servers and switches etc, such that you can see how they will all fit in your rack.  However, quite often the stencils for the servers and other devices are not configured correctly for this.  They don't constrain the dimensions of the device stencil, so that when you make it bigger, it keeps the right shape in both directions, or it tries to anchor in the middle of the device instead of at the bottom, which is how you want.  So, in order to fix this, here's what you do:

1. Open the stencil in Visio.

2. Right click on the header for the Stencil, in the 'Shapes' window and choose 'Edit Stencil'.

3. Double click on the individual device stencil that you want to adjust.  This will bring up this stencil in it's own window.

4. Click on the device stencil so that it is selected.

5. Click on the 'Window' menu (top of Visio screen), and choose 'Show ShapeSheet'.

6. In the 'ShapeSheet' window, there will be sub-panes.  In the 'Shape Transform' pane, get the Width and Height and record them for later, and then close the ShapeSheet window.

7. Go back to the stencil window, again making sure that the device is selected, and then go to the 'Format' menu and choose:

* 'Protection' : Deselect everything except 'Aspect ratio'.
* 'Behavior'   : Change 'Interaction Style' to 'Line (1-dimensional)'

8. Click on the 'Window' menu (top of Visio screen), and choose 'Show ShapeSheet' again.

9. Click on the 'Insert' menu (top of Visio screen), and choose 'Section':

* Select 'Scratch' and then click OK.

10. Choose the 'ShapeSheet' window, 

* in the 'Shape Transform' pane, change:

  Height = GUARD(Width*Scratch.Y1/Scratch.X1)
  LocPinY = Height*0

* in the 'Scratch' pane, insert the recorded values for width and height in for the values of X and Y respectively.

* in the '1-D Endpoints pane, make sure 

  BeginY = 0
  EndY   = 0

11. Close the 'ShapeSheet' window.

12. Close the Stencil window and save changes when prompted.

13. Right click on the header for the Stencil, in the 'Shapes' window and choose 'Save'.

14. Right click on the header for the Stencil, in the 'Shapes' window and choose 'Edit Stencil', which will lock the Stencil for editing.
Now you're done!