Network Diagrams in Visio are extremely useful when trying to design or explain to someone how a set of computers are, or are going to be, connected together.  The user is presented with a set of preset shapes which you can drag to the canvas.

Once on the canvas, simply click or press F2 and start typing to add a text label underneath the shape, like so:

Correct positioning of text

Great, isn’t it?  What could be simpler?

Except, about 6 months ago on Visio 2010, then again last week on Visio 2003, instead of the text label appearing underneath the shape, instead it put it over the top, like this:

This is not useful

Using the yellow diamond text anchor didn’t work either, it just sent the text shooting up and down diagonally down and left to top and right. This really wasn’t what I wanted, so after F1 and some unsuccessful searching, I turned to Bing and Google, but still nothing.  I’d hit this problem twice for what I’m pretty sure were unrelated reasons; maybe occasionally Visio sometimes has a senior moment?

After much clicking I came across the ShapeSheet.  This contains loads of cool power-user configurable items on your shape.  Having a peruse through the list of configurable items, I came across TxtPinX and TxtPinY:

TxtPinX and TxtPinY of the ShapeSheet items for my shape

Adding a .Y to TxtPinY fixed the problem and put the text back where it should be:

Corrected the TxtPinY

Problem solved… for that one shape. Unfortunately, the next server I added had the same problem. So, to fix it for all shapes, I had to edit the document stencil and make the change on the master shape intself. See Resources below for links to Visio documentation that explains this.

Resources