Hello,
I am using Visio Professional in Office 365 and have an issue when using custom shapes. When I drag the shapes into a new document, the line color and style sometimes changes. E. g. a custom polygon shape with a custom dark green outline gets a black outline after it has been dragged into a new document. When I edit the master shape and set the color and style of the outline of the master shape explicitly, the problem goes away, and the custom shape keeps the correct color when dragged in a new document, until I reload the stencil with the custom shape. The stencil was saved before the reload.
What works (of course) is when I drag a custom shape in a document, select the shape with the wrong black outline color, and change the outline color to the greenish color of the original master shape. However, that only works when all lines in a custom shape have the same color and weight, and what I will need in the very near future are more complex custom shapes with different line colors, styles.
Is there a reliable way to to keep all colors and styles of a custom shape after it has been dragged into a document? What am I doing wrong?

The behaviour you are seeing is due to the fact that your shape is getting some of its formatting attributes from the applied design theme and variant.

You can block the effect of themes by applying protection settings to the shape. If you are showing your Developer Tab you can select the shape and click on the Protection Button and tick the theme options.

Attached Images

2023-09-08_11-18-36.png (72.9 KB, 4 views)

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Hi Guessed, thank you for your answer.
While the protection features is useful on its own right, it did not solve the issue.
When I drag a protected custom shape in my document, its properties are still changed, but with protection active, I cannot change the protected properties manually.
I have made an additional observation: when I drag the shape in the document (it represents a valve, so I will call it "valve shape"), select and copy it, then create a new custom shape, edit that, and select paste, the valve shape appears with the correct colors.
That looks like as if the document applies some kind of default settings to shapes that are copied from the ciipboard or dragged from a stencil. I will look into "default formats of a document" closer.

Can you post a file that contains your valve shape? We can probably change the shapesheet to protect it from changes.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia