I’ve written about how I use Visio to graph my knitting charts before.  Back in 2009 I reposted my original symbol set for what was then the latest version of Microsoft Visio.  My original note about using Visio for graphing knitting dates back to 2005, although I was doing it for a quite a while before I wrote about it.

Microsoft Visio has evolved over the years.  MS would tell us that this has been for our own good, and they’ve closed some pretty severe security holes in their Visio document formats that allowed entry of malicious code.  That surgery has been so severe that the latest version of the program – part of the Microsoft Office 2013 suite – no longer accepts older file format stencils.  But my graphing system, used to produce all of the knitting charts on this site was stuck in this older file format.

So.  How to use the older stencils with the latest version of the program?

If you Google something like “Visio won’t open older file formats” you’ll find all sorts of advice.  Some of it includes the intimidating step of editing your registry to bypass the security override.

I’ve done the work for you.  Here is a ZIP file containing brand new stencils manufactured for Visio, MS Office 2013. It will work with the latest version, but not with older ones. The old-post links above will take you to pages where you can download the now-obsolete, earlier formats.

If you are lucky enough to have access to MS Visio (which is unconscionably expensive, but often available if you are a student, or have use of it via work) – you can now use my “tinkertoy” block building system to make charts like this:

For those of you who have other trusted stencils they need to resurrect and re-use with the latest version of the program, here’s what I did to rescue mine.

I found my original *.vss format files.  I knew they were safe, containing no malicious macros. 

Under the File tab, I clicked on “Options” in the blue bar at the left.  On the pop-up Options menu, I clicked on “Trust Center” in the left hand menu bar. This opened a window with various privacy and security statements.  In the main text area of that window, I clicked on the button “Trust Center Settings.”

This brought up  yet another menu screen.  I selected “Trusted Locations” and clicked on the “Add New Location” button at the bottom of that screen.  I noted the default location Microsoft specified as the place where it first stores templates, and used that.  I clicked “OK” to set trusted-status for that location, then kept clicking OK on the nested options windows to close them until I was back out at my main Visio window.

I copied my ancient *.vss stencils into the now trusted location that I had written down.

Visio could now open them, and I could use them, but I could not edit them, and saving the document could prompt dialog boxes keyed to the ancient stencil’s status.  So I re-saved all of the stencil contents to the new *.vssx files you will find contained in the *.zip file above.

To do that, I used a drag-selection box to select all of the symbols in the available shapes sidebar, then right-clicked and chose “Add to My Shapes” from the pop-up action window.  That pulled up yet another action dialog that gave me the option to save the selected shapes to a new stencil.

Yes, this is a long and overly technical post, but I do know there are a few folks who used my old Visio-based knitting notation system, who may have faced this problem.  Now they have a work-around.