Microsoft Visio 2013 : A Visual Orientation to a Visual Product - Minimizing and restoring the Visio ribbon, Understanding shapes, masters, stencils, and templates

Master An object in a Visio stencil. The vast majority of people who create diagrams with Visio use the masters that ship with Visio or that they download from the Internet.

Stencil A collection of masters.

Shape An object on a Visio drawing page. Often you create shapes by dragging a master from a stencil to the drawing page; however, you can also create shapes in other ways. 

A shape can be very simple: a line, a polygon, an image. A shape can also be a sophisticated object that changes appearance or behavior as data values change, as its position on the page changes, or as properties of another shape change—the possibilities are endless.

Template A Visio document that includes one or more drawing pages with preset dimensions and measurement units. A template may also include one or more stencils; it may include background pages and designs; its pages may contain shapes or text. A template may also include special software that only operates in that template.

Workspace A collection of Visio windows and window settings. At minimum, the workspace consists of the drawing window and the zoom settings for the pages in the drawing; frequently, it also includes a Shapes window containing one or more stencils. The workspace can also include the Shape Data, Size & Position, or Pan & Zoom windows. Unless you have changed the default action, Visio saves the on-screen workspace whenever you save the document. As a result, when you next open the same document, the same collection of windows is restored.