The bane of my experience with Visio usually comes down to connectors; being unable to attach them where I want, being unable to adjust the lines to where I want, and then once I’ve got them in place, they start jumping around by themselves when something else is moved. Fortunately I found a few tricks to help ease the pain.

Use the “Connection Point” command to adjust where connectors connect to an object §

If you’re like me, you’ll have never even noticed this button existed. Under the Home tab next to the Connector button, there is a blue “X” symbol called “Connection Point”. Select this, then select an object. You can move existing connection points by clicking on them and dragging. You can delete existing connection points by selecting them and pressing delete. You can create new connection points by holding down Ctrl and clicking.

This makes it much easer to ensure connections connect to the object at the point where you want them to.

Turn off rerouting to stop connections jumping by themselves §

If you don’t want connections to helpfully reroute themselves when another object is moved nearby, you can disable this behaviour on a per-connection basis. (Unfortunately I’ve found no global setting).

Select the connector, then in the “Tell me what you want to do” box at the top, type “behavior” (“behaviour” works too actually!). Switch to the “Connector” tab, and change the “Reroute” option to “Never”, then click OK. You can now move other objects nearby or on top if your connection and it will not reroute!

Moving text labels §

Below the “X” symbol described above is another easy-to-miss button: a small box with curved arrow symbol. This can be used for moving text labels which are attached to objects.