Visio tip: Removing white text boxes
By default, Visio colors the background of text blocks white. This can be frustrating when labeling line segments which cross a colored background. The unwanted white box stands out in a bad way:
To fix this, right-click on the line or text box and navigate to Format > Text in the context menu. Select the Text Block tab. Here you can change the background color to match that of the background shape, or disable the text block background entirely.
However, by setting the background color to None you also remove the line break effected by the text. In this example we've modified the text block background color to match the background shape. Much nicer.
About the Author
Jeremy Stretch is a freelance networking engineer, instructor, and the maintainer of PacketLife.net. He currently lives in Fairfax, Virginia, on the edge of the Washington, DC metro area. Although primarily an R&S guy, he likes to get into everything, and runs a free network training lab out of his basement for fun. You can contact him by email or follow him on Twitter.
Comments
Another nice feature is making the text follow the same angle of the line. When you grab the text and can rotate it, the farther away you move the mouse cursor while holding down the left mouse button the finer the degree of rotation.
Visio was the first thing I started doing when I was still in the Cisco Networking Academy and began an internship at a nearby networking company years ago.
How do you get the text to sit horizontally ??
Hi Felix,
Just right click on text
Go to ' shape ' and select rotate.
That's it.
csc
Jeremy: What source of network symbols are you using in your Visio drawings? Those are simple Cisco Networking Topology Icons (PowerPoint format), copy-pasted to Visio with some Connectors added to them? Or you have some king of shape-library (which you are willing to share:)?
Visio tips are great! More articles of network drawing best-practices and methodologies... :-)
Your suggestion at least got the text inside a Visio Pro 2007 Windows and Dialogs Text box (single-line) control to have background. Yet the rest of the Text box insists on being white.
The Grid Column control was quite simple to get to accept a color background... just I found that the Solid fill pattern (#01) was "broken" so I switched it to pattern 02 and it colored the Grid Column.
Seems Visio Pro 2007 is buggy... not an intuitive UI.
Jeremy, i usually make it a little bit of transparent so the underlying line can be seen.