Does your job involve work with mathematics, physics, engineering or other scientific and technical topics?

Do you need to visually communicate with your co-workers and customers?

If so, then you’ll be interested in this free Visio stencil that is full of feature-rich shapes for illustrating and diagramming angle-related geometry.

I had discovered the Visio Educational Shapes a while back, but forgotten about them. Yesterday, however, a friend at Microsoft asked me if I knew of any shapes that could be used for showing mathematical functions. I thought I’d go through each stencil over the next few weeks and highlight the shapes inside each file.

The full set of Visio educational shapes contains 31 files that includes

• 3 sample drawings
• 19 stencils
• 9 templates

You can get them by visiting the Visio Educational Shapes page over at Microsoft.

The Angles stencil contains 12 shapes that help you to quickly illustrate a variety of angle-related situations. They are cleverly named:

• Angle with bisector
• Exterior angle
• Exterior angle (multiple rotation)
• Geometry (basic)
• Geometry (multiple rotation)
• Geometry (one rotation)
• Gradient
• Interior angle
• Interior angle (multiple rotation)
• Intersecting lines
• Straight line (angle with x-axis)
• Two angles

And this is what they look like:

click to view larger image

You can see that they are fairly complicated, so it’s nice to be able to download a pre-made set of these things!

The shapes have some nice interactive features. For example, you can dynamically change the angle of the line in this shape by pulling on the yellow control handle:

And a simple right-click allows me to show or hide the labels:

We’ll be covering the rest of the shapes in the Visio Educational Shape set soon, so check back here at Visio Guy often!