Microsoft Visio includes a basic report-writing tool, the Report Definition Wizard, which is a useful add-on for viewing the values in Shape Data and User-defined cells. It has limited formatting capabilities and an even more-limited programming interface, but it comes with the product and provides suitable output for numerous scenarios.

The wizard saves report definitions in eXtensible Markup Language (XML) format, which can be opened with external XML editing tools to create advanced filters. The reports can be displayed in several file types or in a Visio shape. This report shape itself can be enhanced to become a filter for selecting shapes. Thus, you can see a filtered list of shapes in the drawing, and you can use this list to select, format, move, or identify them.