No text object?

Question

I'd like to be able to add explanatory text to a flowchart.  Is there no direct way to do this?

The closest I can see is to add it as a box shape node and then set the fill and line colors to "no color".  Is this the best way?

If so, it would be great to actually have this as a pre-defined object.

Answer 1

Indeed, there is no text-only object in yEd. Either use the "invisible node" approach you already describe or add an additional label to an already existing node (right-click a node to open its context menu and choose "Add Label"). Since you can move labels (that use the default "Placement" of "SmartFree: Anywhere") anywhere you want, this works as well.
I recommend the "add additional label" approach, because invisible nodes are hard to work with and since layout algorithms treat invisible nodes like any other node, they often have "surprising" effects for layout calculations.

Regarding the pre-defined object, use yEd's palette manager to create a user-defined palette section, create an invisible node with some text, right-click the invisible node to open its context menu, and choose "Add to Palette". Et voila, you will get your pre-defined invisible text-only node.