What Happened to the Behavior Dialog in Visio 2010?

By stretch | Friday, August 27, 2010 at 12:58 a.m. UTC

One thing that irked me when learning Visio 2010 was the mysterious disappearance of the object behavior dialog. The behavior dialog is useful for modifying, well, the behavior of elements within Visio (e.g. which lines show line jumps and what those jumps look like). In previous versions of Visio, it had been accessible via the right-click context menu (after selecting a line or shape) as Format > Behavior.... Alas, this option has disappeared from the context menu in Visio 2010.

context_menu.png

In fact, upon initial inspection it appears to have been removed from the application entirely. Only after a good deal of searching did I uncover its hiding place: the developer menu. The developer menu is, of course, disabled for a default installation of Visio. To enable it, select the File tab and click Options. Under the Customize Ribbon heading, click the Developer tab checkbox to enable the developer toolbar.

visio_options.png

You should now see a developer tab at top which displays the developer toolbar, complete with a button for the behavior dialog under the Shape Design section.

developer_toolbar.png

About the Author

Jeremy Stretch is a networking engineer and the maintainer of PacketLife.net. He currently lives in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina. Although employed full-time out of necessity, his true passion lies in improving the field of network engineering around the world. You can contact him by email or follow him on Twitter.

Posted in Visio

Comments

Ben commented on Friday, August 27, 2010 at 8:13 a.m. UTC

nice tips, and also nice new visio icons ;-)

stretch commented on Friday, August 27, 2010 at 1:46 p.m. UTC

Yeah, I've been trying out some new icons. Might do a post on them in a bit if I decide to stick with them.

ipguru99 (guest) commented on Friday, August 27, 2010 at 1:48 p.m. UTC

I just can't get enough of this site! Slashdot, linuxtoday and this.. those are the one's I open now.

Staying on Topic, THIS is why I don't use Visio anymore... that and I don't have any Windows left in the shop. But I use to have a VirtualBox with Windows just for Visio.. not anymore. I just use Dia. I have even converted a couple of Windows guys to i. It doesn't look as nice, but for FREE, nobody seems to care when you give them your basic drawings.

Anyway, thanks for this place!

dnewstat commented on Friday, August 27, 2010 at 4:26 p.m. UTC

I was JUST looking for this two days ago! Thanks!

dps218 commented on Thursday, September 9, 2010 at 1:09 p.m. UTC

I have hated Microsoft ever since they removed the "recorder" from Windows 3.1. It was a program that would record your every mouse move and click so that you could play it back. They must have taken it out because they stole the code from someone and forgot to buy the company who wrote it. Microsoft is evil. Do not even get me started.

dps218 commented on Thursday, September 9, 2010 at 1:10 p.m. UTC

Try Linux, I use CENTOS. I really like it :)

lobin commented on Sunday, January 30, 2011 at 5:42 p.m. UTC

Great! I've installed Visio 2k10 recently and fortunately remembered this article :)

Anyway, where are the corner roundings and connector line jump settings in 2k10? Should they be manually added to Custom ribbon tab to Home or simillar?

Ricardo (guest) commented on Tuesday, June 28, 2011 at 8:48 p.m. UTC

Greate tip! :-)

MS! tsk! tsk!

merryll (guest) commented on Monday, July 11, 2011 at 8:34 p.m. UTC

Thanks so much! I recently installed Microsoft's 2010 version for another feature and almost ditched it because I could not figure out how to do this simple task!

pktherder commented on Thursday, August 4, 2011 at 3:22 p.m. UTC

You have saved me from an ugly diagram once again! A mighty oracle you are.

Angus (guest) commented on Sunday, August 21, 2011 at 12:07 p.m. UTC

Thankyou!

I've been looking all over for this.

elv (guest) commented on Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 8:52 a.m. UTC

Thank you. This is exactly what I'm looking for.

OfficeCorner Guy (guest) commented on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 2:54 p.m. UTC

Thank you! Just was I was looking for and the help topics didn't seem to understand me... and just by the by, do people really type Visio 2k10 instead of 2010? lol indeed.

PD (guest) commented on Sunday, May 27, 2012 at 4:07 a.m. UTC

Thank you, thank you, Jeremy!

And Microsoft...is this "improvement" some kind of an evil joke?

guest (guest) commented on Tuesday, June 12, 2012 at 5:16 p.m. UTC

Thank you! Very easy to follow article. Now I can use "behaviors" again!!!

Shavawna (guest) commented on Friday, July 6, 2012 at 5:13 p.m. UTC

Thank you it was driving me crazy!

BA Commando (guest) commented on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 at 9:13 p.m. UTC

This is a question about Visio 2010 that has also annoyed me on and off for many months. But thanks to you for sharing quite simply how to overcome Microsoft again. Now I can turn off that unwanted line-splitting and rerouting for my notation boxes. Cheers!

A guest commented on Thursday, December 27, 2012 at 4:02 p.m. UTC

Thanks Stretch, why the heck did they do that?!?!?!

coflynn (guest) commented on Thursday, February 7, 2013 at 3:42 p.m. UTC

Thanks - thought they removed that function entirely in 2010, handy...

Hemant (guest) commented on Tuesday, April 23, 2013 at 1:22 p.m. UTC

This is very helpful. I did tons of looking around and none of the so called experts could help !

Stephanie M (guest) commented on Tuesday, May 7, 2013 at 9:37 p.m. UTC

I was about to pull out all of my hair, before I saw your post. I couldn't believe that they would get rid of this function. Apparently they didn't, but hid it well enough so no one could find it. Thank you so much for posting this!

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