Frequently Asked Questions

General

Is this an official Cisco product?

No. Cisco owns the network and product icons themselves. This project is a community-built Visio stencil set wrapping those icons with the connection points, shape data, sizing, and search keywords that Cisco’s own published SVG files don’t include. Cisco’s stated terms for its network topology icons, on the Cisco Brand Center, are: “You may use them freely, but you may not alter them.” This project uses the artwork on that basis, with attribution to Cisco, and claims no Cisco affiliation or endorsement.

How is the set built?

It’s generated programmatically. The build scans the source artwork, normalises and scales it, emits the Visio OOXML directly, and verifies every master against a fixed contract: cross-platform, no Visio install required, and deterministic (identical input produces byte-identical .vssx). An earlier approach for similar projects used PowerShell driving Visio over COM, one shape at a time on Windows, with broken icons fixed by hand; this pipeline replaces that entirely and handles gradients, sizing, search cells, stroke geometry, and dark-canvas visibility automatically. See Release Notes.

How is this different from other Cisco stencils?

Cisco’s own .vss collections are dated, unit-fixed (no dual metric/US build), and lack working keyword search, per-master connection points, and shape-data fields. This set is generated fresh from Cisco’s current published SVG library, ships in both Metric and US unit variants, passes a verified search contract on every build, and includes nine connection points and seven network shape-data fields on every master.

Why GPL-3 and not MIT?

GPL-3 prevents the published stencil engineering from being relicensed under a more restrictive licence by downstream consumers: the work stays free for everyone who builds on it. The GPL covers the published packaging and geometry work; the icon artwork stays copyright Cisco under Cisco’s own terms, and the private build pipeline is not distributed at all.

Can I use these in a commercial diagram / book / course?

Yes. The GPL-3 licence on the stencil engineering explicitly permits commercial use; the only requirement is to preserve the licence and attribution. The icon artwork is Cisco’s, published for free use in network topologies under the Cisco Brand Center terms, so commercial diagrams, books, and courses are fine. Keep the attribution to Cisco and don’t imply Cisco endorsement.

Installation and use

What Visio versions are supported?

• Visio for Microsoft 365 (Windows + Mac)
• Visio 2024 / 2021 / 2019 desktop
• Visio Plan 1 and Plan 2

Not supported: Visio for the Web (it cannot render custom .vssx stencils, regardless of source).

How do I install the stencil permanently so it’s available in every drawing?

Drop the .vssx into your My Shapes folder:

• Windows: %USERPROFILE%\Documents\My Shapes
• macOS: ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/User Content/My Shapes

Restart Visio; the stencil appears under More Shapes → My Shapes.

Shape search isn’t returning anything

Three things to try, in order:

1. Verify it’s not just this stencil: type something into the search box that should match a Visio built-in (e.g. process or rectangle). If nothing comes back, your Visio’s shape search is disabled; see Enabling Search for the toggle.
2. Reopen the stencil. Visio caches its keyword index; freshly-installed stencils sometimes need a one-time reopen to re-index.
3. Re-download the stencil. A truncated download can leave the keyword index missing.

Note: if Visio’s own bundled stencils already match a term (for example, common network words), Visio suppresses My Shapes results for that term. This is Visio’s behaviour and has no stencil-side fix. See Troubleshooting for more detail.

My icons are a different size from what I expected

Stencils scaled for metric pages render at the wrong physical size when dropped onto a US-units drawing, and vice versa. Use the _m stencil on metric pages and the _u stencil on US-units pages. See Metric vs US units for detail.

Can I edit / customise a master?

Yes: right-click any master in the Shapes panel → Edit Master. Be aware that editing a master rebuilds its shape sheet and you’ll lose the precise connection-point formulas and shape-data fields. The recommended approach is to drag the master onto a drawing and edit the dropped instance.

How do I populate the shape data fields?

Every master includes seven network-oriented shape-data fields: Hostname, ManagementIP, Model, SerialNumber, Site, Role, and VlanIds. Right-click a dropped shape → Shape Data to fill them in manually. For bulk population, both PowerShell (via the Visio COM object model) and VBA macros can write to shape data cells directly; common sources include Catalyst Center inventory exports, NetBox API queries, and IPAM CSV exports.

Sponsorship and assets

Do I need to sponsor?

No. Everything in this project is free: the .vssx stencils, the per-icon SVG files, and the PNG renders. Sponsoring is entirely optional support for the ongoing maintenance of this project and the sibling Visio-Azure project. See Sponsorship.

Where do I get the SVG and PNG files?

They are in the public repository alongside the stencils:

• SVG/: 486 individual .svg files, normalised and scaled, including -DM dark-mode variants.
• PNG/: 486 .png renders at 20 mm icon size at 300 DPI, aspect preserved, DPI-tagged so they insert at the correct physical size.
• Visio-Cisco-Assets-V1.zip: the full asset set in a single download at the repo root.

No sponsorship or sign-up required.

Contributing

How do I report a wrong-looking icon?

Open an issue at https://github.com/xeeva/Visio-Cisco/issues with:

• The icon name
• A screenshot of how it renders in Visio
• The source SVG name from Cisco’s published icon library

How do I request a new icon?

If Cisco has published an SVG for the product or technology, link to it in a new issue. If they haven’t, the request gets parked until they do: the project policy is “ship what Cisco publishes” rather than authoring new designs.

Can I contribute fixes?

The build pipeline is private (see below), so code contributions aren’t possible. The most useful contribution is a precise report: open an issue at https://github.com/xeeva/Visio-Cisco/issues describing the problem (icon name, screenshot, Visio version), and the fix lands in the pipeline so the next build corrects it everywhere.

Technical

Is the build pipeline open-source?

No. The pipeline is the most valuable thing this project owns, and it stays private. It is a comprehensive, purpose-built toolchain developed in partnership with Claude (Anthropic’s AI): an empirical lab against Visio’s own search behaviour to derive the search contract, native SVG-to-Visio geometry conversion including true stroke rendering for Cisco’s line-drawn artwork, deterministic byte-identical builds, automated visual inspection of every icon, and a per-master contract machine-verified on every run. That accumulated engineering is the intellectual property that keeps this project and Visio-Azure maintained, so the pipeline itself is not shared. Everything it produces is: the stencils, the SVG and PNG assets, the sample drawing, and this documentation are all free.

Why not Draw.io / Mermaid / Lucidchart?

Visio is what enterprise network documentation tends to land in. The combination of pixel-precise connection-point control, Shape Data binding (for programmatic round-tripping with tools like Catalyst Center, NetBox, or IPAM), and the breadth of legacy and corporate templates means Visio still owns this niche for network engineers. This project respects that.

How is the broken-search fix verified?

Every build runs an automated verify step that asserts the search keywords, Prompt fields, connection points, shape-data fields, and document metadata are present in every required OOXML location on every master. The build fails if a single master misses the contract, so a release cannot ship with broken search.

Are the builds reproducible?

Yes. The same Icon-Source directory produces byte-identical .vssx files. ZIP timestamps are fixed at 1980-01-01; file lists are sorted; no PIDs or wall-clock data appear in outputs. The BUILD_REPORT.html in each release folder includes SHA-256 hashes of every artefact.