In the Design tab, click on Freeze Properties to freeze or unfreeze properties of a shape.
This is especially useful when creating a new symbol using grouped shapes.
For example, let's say you want to group a few shapes to create a new symbol for a landscape or floor plan design so they're easier to place in your drawing. In this example, we grouped a desk and a chair. In the group, we colored the desk brown and the chair blue.
To demonstrate what freezing properties will help with, we'll first show you what happens when you don't freeze any properties. Without freezing any properties, when I change the fill color of the newly grouped symbol, everything gets recolored. This may also happen if you copy-paste your new symbol into a document that has a theme where shapes automatically pick up the current style for the theme.
Freezing properties allows you to control what can change about your new symbol.
You can lock down just fill color or many other properties.
Fill Color - Locks in the fill color as is for all shapes in a group
Fill Texture - Locks the current texture of any shapes in a group
Shadows and Glow - Prevents you from changing shadows and glows
Effects - Prevents you from changing any effects, effects like reflection, bevel, and gloss
Text Properties - Locks the text font, style, weight, color and more
Line or Border Color - Prevents changing the color of lines or shape borders
Line or Border Thickness - Prevents changing the thickness of lines and shape borders
Line or Border Pattern - Locks in the pattern (like dashes) of lines and shape borders
Arrowheads - Locks in the current selected arrowhead style
Styles - Styles are SmartDraw's baked in combination of effects used in Themes. These are a combination of fill colors, line properties and effects. Locking out changin styles, let's your shape remain the selected color even if you change your drawing's theme.
Once a property is locked, it can't be changed by your or by anyone else if you use it in a template or drawing you share with your team.
Some of SmartDraw's built-in templates will contain symbols that have some or all of their properties frozen. If you're trying to change fill color or line color on a symbol used in an existing template and it's not changing, you may want to select the shape and check this dialog to see if any options are checked. You can uncheck them to allow yourself to change the shape properties you want to modify.