Microsoft Visio 2013 : Creating a New Diagram - Selecting shapes

You can use several techniques for selecting shapes in Visio. The most obvious is that you can click once on a shape to select it. To select more than one shape using this method, hold down the Shift key or the Ctrl key while clicking additional shapes. You can remove shapes from an existing selection with the same method.

A second common technique is to draw a bounding box around one or more shapes. You draw a bounding box by clicking anywhere on the page background and moving the mouse while holding down the mouse button. The bounding box appears as a gray rectangle.

The default behavior in Visio is to select any shapes that are fully surrounded by a bounding box. For example, in the following graphic on the left, the rectangle and octagon will be selected when you release the mouse button. In the graphic on the right, no shapes will be selected.

Visio offers an alternative to a bounding box that lets you select shapes with a freeform lasso. To change from area select (another name for the bounding box technique) to lasso select, on the Home tab, in the Editing group, click the Select button, and then click Lasso Select. To create a lasso selection, click the left mouse button and drag a lasso around the shapes of interest, being certain to end at the same place you began. When you release the mouse button, the enclosed shapes will be selected. The lasso in the following graphic on the left produces the selection on the right.

Area/lasso selection and click selection are not mutually exclusive. You can select one or more shapes by clicking first, and then add additional shapes by holding down Shift or Ctrl while drawing a bounding box or lasso loop. The reverse works as well: you can start with a bounding box or lasso selection and add additional shapes by using the same keyboard and mouse combination.