(Note – it doesn’t really matter whether you delete the master and edit the instance shape (followed by recreating a master from the instance) or just edit the document master shape directly. Right click on the Printer master and delete it, clicking OK to the warning dialog that pops up.You should see a master named Printer, which was created when you first pasted the shape into the document. In the blank document, tick the Developer / ShowHide / Document Stencil checkbox to display the masters for the new document.Close the original network diagram document as you’re now finished with it.(Note – you could just open the respective stencil in in your blank document, but either way gets you to the same place – a new instance shape, in a new document.) Now copy the Printer instance shape in the network diagram document, flick over to the new blank document (Ctrl+Tab) and paste it onto the new page.From the network diagram document, select the Network and Peripherals – 3D stencil and drag and drop a Printer onto the page.Create another new document, this time a blank one, under File / New / Featured / Blank Document.
Create a new ‘Detailed Network Diagram – 3D’ document, under File / New / Categories / Network.If you’ve not come across the ShapeSheet before then you might be interested in the first part of this post – Just for starters. This will give you another tab (Developer) from where you can reach the ShapeSheet and other handy tools like the Drawing Explorer. If you haven’t already, make sure the Developer option is checked under File / Options / Advanced / General / Run in developer mode. In this post I’m going to look at that second option as the method offers greater scope for changes beyond this particular problem.
Alternatively, you could open up the ShapeSheet and change the sizing behaviour. Firstly, and most simply, you could change the drawing scale, which is 1:1 by default, and then increase the page size all under Design / Page Setup (Shift+F5). Here’s a couple of screenshots comparing, on top, the standard drop size (1 inch) and, on the bottom, the scaled down size (0.255 inches):
The problem I’m trying to solve here is that the 3D printer shape has fixed values for line weight which, while working perfectly well in most situations, don’t scale correctly when the shape is shrunk beyond certain limits. The following is based on Visio 2013, but it’s exactly the same process in 2010 and bar ribbon UI differences previous versions as well.