I connected my visio professional 2010 diagram to an excel sheet with a list of items with some properties. 

I want to display nice rectangles with the items name and some properties in it.

When I link a data item to a plain rectangle, the data appears but I am not able to format and configure it properly (e.g. fonts, colours, positions in the box).

I found general instructions how to link data and very complex documentation around shapesheet (whose complexity is a bot overwhelming for a visio newbie)

**How can I - in a simple way - create boxes from linked data that have for example the item's name in bold, horizontally centered, at the top of the box, and some of its attributes (with label) in a smaller font below ?**

Somehow I think of a preconfigured template of such a shape whose text-data can be populated semi-automatically from excel data following this process:

Preparation:

1. Link excel data to diagram (clear)
2. Create shape template (unclear)

Doing:

1. link data items to shape instances (clear)
2. Free Visual Layout (clear)