In a Microsoft Office Visio drawing, shapes represent both objects in the real world and concepts. Visio shapes can represent:

• Objects in the physical world, such as desks, chairs, and computers on a floor plan, or circuits in an electrical engineering drawing.
• Objects in an organizational hierarchy, such as employees or positions in an organization chart.
• Objects in a process or sequence, such as steps in a flowchart.
• Objects in a software or database model, such as entities and relationships in a database model diagram.

Visio shapes are designed to behave the way you want them to in a particular context. For example, shapes for doors, windows, and desks―things that are built to standard industry sizes―are locked against resizing so that you cannot accidentally stretch the shapes inappropriately as you work with them.

Simple vs. complex shapes

One-dimensional vs. two-dimensional shapes