Visio 2007: How do I prevent connectors from snapping to the center of shapes?

Question

I am working on a very tight diagram and the connectors keep on snapping to the center of boxes and circles when I want them to connect somewhere else. There seems to be a threshold where if you are close enough to the center, it automatically snaps to it.

Problem is, my shapes are small and crowded and sometimes overlapping each other. This snapping-to-center is annoying for drawing very detailed diagrams and there seems to be no way to disable this.

I checked all the snap settings but it does not include this.

Answer 1

Firstly, with very tight shapes, the way to deal with this is to zoom in to the diagram. Use the zoom control in the bottom right (see pic below), or use press CTRL and scroll the wheel up (zoom in) or down (zoom out).

Zoom Control

To disable the snap effect, disable one or both Snap and Glue. This configuration is available from the View tab: click the the pop-out icon, then disable one or both Snap and Glue is the resulting dialog:

Snap & Glue dialog

Further reading: Adjust snap strength or turn snap off

Answer 2

I believe what you want is to configure the shape layout. In Visio 2007 this is under Shape > Configure Layout.... To make it so that lines don't snap to center change the Style to Radial. The Spacing setting I believe tells your lines how close they can be to each other, though they'll be farther apart if they can.

Other styles like Circular may do this as well, but Radial is the one I'm familiar with.

In Visio 2013 this is called Re-Layout Page under the Design ribbon. If you click on More Layout Options... at the bottom of the menu it'll display the same window.

Answer 3

Honestly, I feel as though all these answers are over-complicating the issue.

My Solution?

• Draw the base object 1st (a wall in floor plan mode for instance).
• Then put the object on that base obect (a window ON TOP of the wall).