Visio Guy 
Circular Multi-arrows
Posted by Visio Guy on October 9th, 2006 14332 views
Visio users have been requesting the ability to add more than five stinking arrows to the Circular Arrow shape. This shape, which comes with Visio, is found in Charts and Graphs > Marketing Diagrams stencil.
Today's download offers an improved version of this shape. It allows you to add up to 20 arrows, automatically color them, and choose from 3 arrowhead styles!
Microsoft's Circular Arrow shape is not easily customizable by users, or even crazy people/experts like me. So in true Visio-addict-fashion, I've built a better, brand-spankin' new mousetrap and posted it here for your enjoyment and consumption! Tell your friends: Free Custom Visio Marketing Shapes!!! Now that's a mouthful!
The shape comes in three flavors: Pointy Arrow, Streamlined Arrow and Bar. Each flavor comes in two "sizes": up-to-10-arrows and up-to-20-arrows. That's six bonus masters, just for reading this blog! Count 'em: SIX! That ought to satiate even the most arrow-hungry of you out there!
The three flavors differ mainly in arrowhead style:
The diagram explains more about how to use the shapes, and the options available via the shape's context menu. I hope this helps a few of you make even more dazzling marketing diagrams!
Download: CircularMultiArrow.zip (249 KB)
Edit 2007.10.10 See the article: Circular Multi-arrows in Powerpoint, for a similar tool that can be used in PowerPoint!
Edit 2007.11.26 Visio 2002 format now available:
Download: Circular Multi-arrow 2002.zip (239 KB)
October 14th, 2006 at 11:44 pm
Only you would go overboard like this.
So was the five arrow one of your original shapes?
October 14th, 2006 at 11:44 pm
Nah, I don’t think I made the original shape. (Phew!)
By the way, I just uploaded a newer version where you can set the arrow-text to be level instead of rotated. Just right-click!
October 14th, 2006 at 11:44 pm
Just what I was looking for!!!
November 14th, 2006 at 7:40 pm
Thank you! This is just exactly what I was looking for. (* Are you married? *)
November 14th, 2006 at 11:36 pm
We actually laid-out and printed our wedding invitations using Visio (true story!)
January 11th, 2007 at 8:30 am
This is really SUPER!! Finally the circular shape I have been looking for.
But, one little question: All the arrows are now evenly distributed along the circle, is it possible to make them adjustable? For example, when you have a 2 arrow shape you can make one arrow 2/3 of the circle and the other is automatically set to 1/3 of the circle??
January 11th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
Hi Pieter,
Good idea. It’s probably pretty difficult to do what you need with the shapes I built. I thought about doing that, but such a shape really needs a more sophisticated user-interface to control so many arrows. This would be beyond what the ShapeSheet could provide and would require separate programming, which I didn’t want to do for this revision.
Maybe sometime in the future!
- Chris
January 16th, 2007 at 6:55 am
You rock! Made my day and saved my presentation w/ diagram from viewer disater!
February 13th, 2007 at 12:05 am
It’s a great improvement BUT…
Is it possible to have the arrows spiralling in towards the centre?
Also, with the text box, I like the rotating text but how do I make the text box inside the arrow longer, to span across more of the arrow?
Thanks,
Cristina T.
February 13th, 2007 at 6:59 am
Hi Cristina,
There’s no feature in these shapes that would allow spiralling towards the center. We’d have to build a new shape.
As for the text, it seems to me that the text grows as you type to be as long as — or even longer than — the arrow. If you hit return, you can force a line wrap which will fit more text inside of the arrow.
April 10th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
Thank you very much for these templates. I had been struckling for hours trying to make these shapes before finding your website.
One suggestion for a future update: Dynamic text boxes on each arrow that curve with the arrow.
Thanks again!
April 10th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
Hi Jakob,
Thanks for the nice words, I’m glad the shapes helped!
Visio doesn’t support text-on-a-curve, but it sure would be a nice feature!
- Chris
April 13th, 2007 at 6:03 am
Help Visio Guy
Do you have versions that I can use in my Visio 2000?
May 2nd, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Perfect. Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!
May 30th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
You freakin’ rule !!! I needed a 7 arrow shape and spent almost half an hour in visio trying to create a simple curved line arrow and then manipulating the rotation and finally gave up. I am so glad there are smart people out there that can expand on a default object. You really saved me with your modifications..
Paul
June 14th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
Thanks for this circle arrow. It took me a while to find them in the web but it was much faster than to understand how to crete them.
Nice feature for the future would be to give each segement a own define color.
Uwe
June 28th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
Thank you!
August 9th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
Thanks for the shape. How could I define my own colors??
August 20th, 2007 at 9:54 pm
Superb template. Boy do I wish I had happened upon this before I went to the trouble of programming a massively complex similar thing in PowerPoint. But now that I did that, if anyone’s interested in mine, let me know. As I say it’s in PPT, but it does some things some posters have asked for. It differs from VisioGuy’s one in that it can only have “streamlined” arrow type; it can do 1 to 10 arrows but not more; it allows (actually, forces) you to choose color of each arrow individually; it lets you set diameter of overall donut and thickness of the arrow band; it fakes placing the text on a curve by putting each character in its own text box (!); and lets you choose text font and size. All these things are configurable in a dialog box; it then saves your choices and text to a file so that next time you run it, it reloads what you had last time. Practically speaking, you can’t (or, wouldn’t want to) edit the text in PPT since each character is its own text box; the reloading of the dialog sort of gets around that by letting you easily delete an arrow-set and recreate it.
August 21st, 2007 at 2:33 am
Hi Freddy,
I think I’ve got the colors locked down…because of the “smart coloration”. I should post another version of the shapes. ‘Til then, you’ll have to go into Window > Show ShapeSheet for each sub-shape (arrow) and remove the GUARD from the FillForegnd cells in the Fill Format section. Then you can freely color the arrows!
August 21st, 2007 at 2:35 am
Hi Dahveed,
Do you have a link for your smart PowerPoint arrows? They sound really cool. If not, you can send to me at this e-mail, after you decrypt it: “Visio Guy [at] Hot Mail [dot] com”, and maybe I can post it on Visio Guy for you.
August 21st, 2007 at 3:31 pm
thank you so much for this - you saved me hours of frustration!!!
October 10th, 2007 at 3:16 am
Hi Dahveed, I just read about your ppt arrows that you created. Is it possible to get a copy of it? I’d like to use it for a presentation. Thanks. Leslie
October 10th, 2007 at 11:48 am
Leslie3 and Folks,
Dahveed’s PowerPoint arrow generator has just been posted. Have a look at Circular Multi-arrows in PowerPoint!
- Chris
November 21st, 2007 at 4:26 pm
Thank you! I’d spent ages trying to modify it myself - doh!
November 26th, 2007 at 10:13 am
Hello Guy!
I can’t use the multi arrow you designed, maybe because i’m using visio 2002?
Could you also save it as a 2002 file pls?
Thanks in advance and regards.
Philippe
November 26th, 2007 at 10:36 am
Hi Phillipe,
Check the end of the post again, I’ve added a Visio 2002 version of the Circular Multi-arrows shapes!
- Chris
November 26th, 2007 at 8:57 pm
Thanks a million, Chris :))
Philippe
November 28th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Hi.
Good design, who make it?
December 19th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
After a frustrating hour exercising many mouse clicks and trying to arrive at 6 arrows, I turned to the net and found your solution. Thank you.
January 4th, 2008 at 9:57 am
Hi
What a brilliant site!
Just one question:
Can the arrows be seperated out at all? i.e not joined together.
Thanks
January 22nd, 2008 at 1:02 pm
thank you very much! good shape!
May 30th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Extremely useful!
June 7th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
[…] in October 2006, Visio Guy posted the Circular Multi-arrow Shapes that offer superior capabilities to the popular in-the-Visio-box […]
July 7th, 2008 at 12:20 am
Thanks for this. I’m wondering if there is a way to make the shape oval? I turned off ASPECT protection but I still couldn’t get it to adjust. Please advise.
July 7th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Hi Stacy,
I don’t think it will work. I put a lot of work into creating the smart geometry for circular arrows. If we were to squish them, the arrows would probably look terrible.
A crummy work-around might be to make a metafile out of your arrows. Get them configured the way you want, then copy the circle, select Edit > Paste Special and choose: Paste as Metafile.
This will create a dumb, clip-art object that you can squish. I don’t think it will look too good, but it’s better than nothing!
August 20th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Hi Chris,
I think this is a great tool you have created…and have used it often!
Quick question…is it possible to change the color of just one shape?
Thank you for your help!
Joe