Documentation

Enabling Search

Enabling Visio Shape Search

Visio’s Shape Search is the search box at the top of the Shapes panel. Typing anything into it does a full-text query across every open stencil’s masters – name, keywords, prompts, descriptions. When it works it’s the single fastest way to find one of 1,764 icons.

The catch: the legacy community Azure stencils didn’t write keywords into the cells Visio actually indexes, so shape search appeared broken for users on those stencils. Visio-Azure fixes this. But you also need Visio’s own search feature enabled to make use of the fix.

What we did to make search work

Every master in Visio-Azure carries the service name, group, and a handful of useful search terms written into every location Visio’s indexer reads:

Location What’s stored Why it matters
Master/@NameU and @Name Display name The canonical name visible in the panel
Master/Prompt Comma-separated keyword string Shape Search reads this directly
MasterContents/PageSheet/Section[ShapeKeywords]/Row/Cell Legacy ShapeKeywords cell Required for older Visio versions
Master/Description Long-form description Indexed in some Visio releases
Document-level <Keywords> in docProps/app.xml All masters’ keywords joined Stencil-wide search
<dc:subject> in docProps/core.xml Same as above Backup index

Most existing Azure icon stencils, including the widely-used David-Summers/Azure-Design set, write keywords into only one of these, the PageSheet ShapeKeywords cell, which is not what Visio’s shape search reads on modern Visio versions; that is why typing a service name into the Shapes panel on those sets comes up empty. Visio-Azure writes to all six locations, so it is a drop-in replacement: the same icons and names, with shape search that actually works.

Verifying it works on your machine

  1. Open any Visio-Azure stencil.
  2. Click into the search box at the top of the Shapes panel.
  3. Type vmss – you should see Virtual Machine Scale Set show up immediately.
  4. Try other shortcut queries: key vault, cosmos, app gateway, front door.

If nothing happens when you type, your Visio’s search index may be off. The next section covers turning it on.

Shape Search is on by default on most Visio installs. If your search box is missing or queries return nothing across all stencils (not just this one):

Visio for Microsoft 365 (Windows)

  1. File → Options → Advanced.
  2. Scroll to Shape Search.
  3. Check Show Shape Search panel.
  4. OK.

Visio 2019 / 2021 desktop

  1. File → Options → Advanced.
  2. Find Shape search options.
  3. Ensure Enable shape search is checked, and (optionally) Search Visio.com if you also want the online catalogue.
  4. OK.

Visio for Mac

The Mac version of Visio has Shape Search built-in and visible by default in the Shapes panel. There is no toggle.

Reindexing if results are stale

Visio caches its keyword index for performance. If you’ve just installed a fresh stencil and search results look stale:

  1. File → Close the drawing.
  2. Reopen Visio.
  3. Open the stencil again – the index rebuilds on first use.

On Windows you can also force a full reindex by deleting %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Visio\ShapeSearch.idx and restarting Visio.

Why the legacy stencils’ search “worked but didn’t”

The original PowerShell + Visio-COM pipeline set Shapekeywords on the PageSheet of each master. The PageSheet is the per-master settings sheet that holds size, fill style, layer membership, and miscellaneous cells. It looked like the right place to put keywords – but Visio’s shape-search indexer reads the Prompt attribute on the master element itself and the Description, not an arbitrary cell inside the PageSheet. So the keywords were stored, but never queried.

Visio-Azure writes the same keyword string to every reasonable location. If a future Visio version changes which cell its indexer reads, search will still work because the data is in all of them.

Still no results?

If you see vmss failing on Visio-Azure stencils specifically (not on Visio’s built-in shapes), the stencil file is corrupt or out-of-date.

  1. Re-download the stencil from the releases page.
  2. Open an issue at github.com/xeeva/Visio-Azure/issues with your Visio version, OS, and the search term that didn’t return anything.
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