Understanding the Drawing Explorer window

The Drawing Explorer window can be opened in the Visio UI in the Show/Hide group on the DEVELOPER tab. It is an extremely useful method for visually navigating some of the collections and objects in the Visio application. The DEVELOPER tab is shown in this screenshot with an additional ribbon group that was created by the Visio SDK, and a custom-extra ribbon group for some common commands that I use repeatedly.

The Drawing Explorer window starts with the active document object as the top-level node, and displays the Masters, Pages, and Styles collections, among others, in subnodes.

Note

There are two different page collections: Foreground Pages and Background Pages. You will normally find all of the interesting shapes in the Foreground Pages collection, since the Background Pages are usually used for backgrounds and titles.