Hello thanks for posting on the community!

You are correct that layers do not carry over from one page view to another. If you want those same layers on another page of your document you will need to manually create those layers for each individual page. More information on the possibilities available with layers please check out our Create Multi-Layered Diagrams article. 

Once you have created the layers you can use actions to toggle on and off the layers that you have set up on that page. For more information regarding this functionality please refer to our Actions (Links) and Hotspots article.

Hope this helps!

If I put the common objects on another page is there a way to embed them into a layer? That way at least all of the changes can be made in one place instead of having to make the same changes on multiple pages.

Hi thanks for following up!

Unfortunately what you are trying to do with embedding the same layer into multiple pages within inputting a layer and then adding the desired shapes onto each individual page is not currently possible. Would you mind adding your idea to our Feature Request Form?

As a workaround something you can do is create a custom shape library and add custom shapes you create to that library. You can also group together shapes to make them a single shape before adding them to the custom shape library. This could facilitate the process of adding those shapes to a layer on each page you are hoping to add it to. To learn about grouping multiple shapes into one please check out the Create Advanced Custom Shapes section of our Modify Format and Style Shapes article. For information on creating a Custom Shape Library please refer to our Shapes Library article. 

Hope this helps!

I have tried the suggested technique of creating a custom shape and I can see how that would be useful in initially adding the common objects. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be anyway to get changes to the custom object to be reflected in diagrams where they have been used. Not really surprising but I was hoping that I might get lucky with that.

I thought I had a brilliant idea where I would create a Master page containing the shared objects in different layers. Unfortunately when I apply the Master page to my other pages the layers don't seem to be honored. That was quite surprising since the basic information about Master pages specifically mentions layers. Is there a trick to getting the Master page layers to propagate to the other pages or is the documentation just misleading? The way that they seem to work is not every intuitive. I would expect everything from my Master page to be replicated as is.

Hello! Thanks for continuing this post and apologies for the confusion about how Master pages function. Master pages can be used to create header/footers or background designs to apply to other pages within the same document. Because of this layers created in the Master page will not reflect when applied to other pages. You can find more details about this in our Master Pages article.

However we are always looking for ways to improve. Would you mind adding your idea to the Feature Request form linked in Shanna's previous response? Ideas submitted to this form are passed on to the product development team for their consideration.

Thanks for your feedback and please let us know if you have any additional questions about this. Hope this helps!