Visio provides eye-catching, easy-to-use smart clip art shapes that are similar to the clip art you're probably already familiar with. But Visio smart clip art goes beyond conventional clip art; you can configure smart clip art shapes to convey different ideas.

This article describes how to:

• Get smart clip art shapes
• Configure smart clip art shapes

And provides:

• Sample uses for smart clip art shapes

Get smart clip art shapes

Although smart clip art shapes aren't shipped in the Visio product, you can still open them while you're working in Visio. To add smart clip art to your drawing, click Find Shape on the toolbar, and then search for smart clip art shapes.

To locate and use smart clip art shapes

1. In Visio, on the Standard toolbar, click the Find Shape button.
2. In the lower-right corner of the Find Shape pane, click Options.
3. On the General tab, if Everywhere doesn't appear, click the arrow in the Where box, and then click the check box next to The Internet. To close the Where box, click the arrow again, and then click OK.
4. In the Find Shape pane, under Search for, type smart clip art, click All of these words, and then click Go.
5. Under Smart Clip Art, drag the shape you want onto the drawing page.

Tips

• If you use certain smart clip art shapes frequently, you can save them to a stencil, and then save the stencil with the diagram type you want.
• You can download a Visio Smart Clip Art stencil from the Downloads on Office Online Web page.

Configure smart clip art shapes

Most smart clip art shapes are configurable, which means you can easily change a shape's appearance or behavior. You can configure smart clip art shapes several different ways, as shown in the following table.

Method of configuring	Example shape (before)	Example shape (after)
Use yellow control handles to resize a shape. For example, drag a control on the In/Out Box shape to change the height of the paper pile.
Right-click a shape to see special commands. For example, right-click the Padlock shape, and then click Unlock Padlock.
Add text to shapes. For example, with the Newspaper shape selected, type the headline that you want.

Samples

You can use smart clip art shapes in innovative ways to make your business diagrams more interesting and meaningful:

• You can highlight the beginning and end dates on a project timeline using the Calendar shape.

  

• You can use smart clip art shapes to add visual interest to a diagram.