In MS Visio, you can create a master stencil, and then drag shapes from that stencil into multiple drawings. However, once it is dragged into a drawing the shape is copied into the document stencil for that drawing. Editing the master stencil (from which the shape was originally dragged in from) has no effect on the shape in the drawing. You must edit the shape in the document stencil.
This is of course extremely inconvenient, can the document stencil be linked to the master stencil so that updating the master will have an effect on every drawing derived from it? It makes sense that it wouldn't step through searching for every drawing using a shape from the stencil you just edited, but it seems reasonable to be able to "link" a drawing to a master stencil and for the drawing to look at the master stencil it is Linked with every time it is opened and apply any changes to it's own document stencil.
So, my question: Is this type of functionality possible in visio? I am currently working with the standard version, but perhaps the professional version has a feature similar to this?
If not, is it achievable through VBA? Even a VBA script that will run through a folder, checking every drawing and making updates to the document stencil would be enormously helpful. I don't know how to immediatly tackle this, and it is fairly complex, so I thought it best to pose a question here first.
