Stacking and Grouping Shapes in Visio 2003

Often when creating custom shapes or working with composite shapes, there may be a need to arrange the constituent shapes with respect to each other to get a desired stacking order. For instance, lets say, we need to create a shape composed of an ellipse and a rectangle surrounding it. After drawing the ellipse, now when a rectangle is drawn around it. The rectangle will obscure the ellipse completely.

In order to get the desired effect, right click the rectangle that sits in front of the ellipse, and select Shape > Send to Back.

This will fix the stacking order to give the desired effect.

Another problem with this newly created shape is that the two constituent shapes, the ellipse and the rectangle can be moved around independent of each other. Which may not be desirable. To prevent the two shapes from being disconnected from each other, select the two shapes. Right-click the selection and select Shape > Group. This will bind the two shapes into one entity such that they can no longer be moved around in a drawing, independent of each other.