Microsoft Office Visio 2003 Inside Out (Inside Out (Microsoft))

The easiest way to create drawings is to drag master shapes from stencils and drop them on the drawing page. This is called drag-and-drop drawing. If you start your drawing based on a template, the shapes you need are docked on the left side of the Visio window. To assemble your diagram, you add shapes, connect them if necessary, and adjust the layout. To add a professional touch, you can apply quick formatting touches, such as a background or color scheme.

Not all drawings and diagrams go together in this way, but most of the business diagrams do. If you have Microsoft Office Visio Professional 2003 and are creating a floor plan, process engineering diagram, database model, UML diagram, or Web site map, you should refer to the chapters about those diagram types for direction. This chapter describes the fundamental techniques for working with Visio shapes and pages that apply to most diagram types.

Adding Shapes to a Diagram

The fastest way to create a drawing in Visio is to drag a master shape from a stencil onto the drawing page. Dragging means that you point to a shape with the pointer tool, hold down the left mouse button, and then move the mouse. Release the mouse button to drop the shape into place. As you drag, Visio snaps the shape to the nearest grid line. Snapping is the subtle tug you feel as you drag a shape. A grid line is one of the faint, nonprinting vertical or horizontal lines that Visio displays by default on the drawing page. Together, snapping and grid lines help you align shapes perfectly.

Visio can snap shapes to other objects, and you can control the degree of “tug” Visio uses when snap is active. For details, see “Snapping Shapes for Automatic Alignment,” page 436.

Snapping can get in the way of some tasks. For example, if you don’t want to align to the grid, or you’re trying to draw a freeform curve, you might find it easier to do so if snapping is turned off. Choose Tools, Snap & Glue, clear the Snap check box under Currently Active, and then click OK. While you’re in the dialog box, you might also change what your shapes snap to by selecting the appropriate boxes under the Snap To header. To turn snapping back on, reverse the procedure by selecting the Snap check box in the Snap & Glue dialog box. If the Snap & Glue toolbar is visible (View, Toolbars, Snap & Glue), you can do the same thing by clicking the Toggle Snap button.

Identifying Parts of a Shape

When a shape is selected, Visio provides a lot of visual feedback in the form of green squares and circles, yellow diamonds, and blue ’s, as Figure 2-1 shows. What are these colorful markers for? In essence, they tell you how the shape works. The important parts of a shape are as follows:

• Selection handles (the green squares) When you click a shape, you select it, which means that the next action you take applies to the shape. If you see selection handles it means that a shape is selected. You can drag a selection handle to size a shape. Drag a corner selection handle to size it proportionally. (Lines do not have corner selection handles.)

• New Feature Rotation handles (the green circles above most shapes) You can rotate most shapes in Visio. In other words, you can change their angle on the drawing page. In past versions of Visio this required the Rotation tool, but no longer. Now to rotate a shape you merely need to select the shape, place your cursor over the rotation handle and drag the handle to reposition the angle of the shape.

• Connection points (the blue ’s) When you connect shapes, connection points tell you where to glue connectors and lines. Glue keeps shapes together so that they stay attached when moved. You can add connection points to the inside, outside, or perimeter of a shape, and you can hide them from view (View, Connection Points).

• Control handles (the yellow diamonds) Some shapes have built-in intelligence in the form of control handles that you can drag to adjust the shape’s appearance. Control handles vary in what they do. For details, see “Control Handles” later in this chapter.

  Figure 2-1: The types of handles on a shape indicate how the shape can be used. Not all shapes have connection points or control handles.

  Tip

  Changing the center of rotation Shapes rotate around their center of rotation. This point is shown as a small green circle within the shape. You can, however, change where this center of rotation is located and thus change the point about which the shape rotates. To do so click and drag the circle to a new location.

Using 1-D and 2-D Shapes

Visio shapes fall into two broad categories (shown in Figure 2-2) that affect how you can move and resize them:

• 1-D shapes have endpoints and are often used as connectors between two 2-D shapes. They sometimes, but not always, look like lines. You can drag an endpoint in any direction to rotate and stretch the shape.

• 2-D shapes have up to eight selection handles, including corner handles that you can use to resize the shape.

  Figure 2-2: When you select a shape, the type of handles that appear indicate whether it’s a 1-D or a 2-D shape.

Control Handles

Some shapes have control handles that provide unique editing options. Control handles work differently depending on the design and purpose of a shape. For example, you can use a control handle to move the built-in lines on a Predefined Process shape, change the shadow depth on a 3-D box, or pull a connector directly out of a shape, as Figure 2-3 shows. The way to tell what a control handle does is to pause the pointer over the handle until Visio displays its ScreenTip.

Figure 2-3: When you select a shape that includes a control handle, you can pause the mouse over the handle to display a ScreenTip.

Connecting Shapes as You Add Them

The fast way to assemble any connected diagram, from a flowchart to a network diagram, is to connect shapes as you work. Visio provides several techniques for connecting shapes that make specific drawing tasks faster and the diagram easier to create. Table 2-1 summarizes the ways you can connect shapes. When you connect shapes, you’re not just drawing a line between them. You’re gluing the shapes so that when one moves, the other goes with it. Visio shows you when you’re gluing a connector to a point or a shape—a red box appears around the point or the shape, as Figure 2-4 shows.

Figure 2-4: You can create connections between shapes or specific points on shapes. The difference lies in how the connector moves when you rearrange the shapes.

You typically use the Connector tool on the Standard toolbar to draw connectors between shapes. Connectors are a special type of line that automatically finds the best route between shapes. For example, in a flowchart, if you move a process shape that’s connected to a decision shape with a connector, the connector is automatically rerouted. In fact, there’s so much intelligence built into connectors that there’s an entire chapter about it in this book.

Finding the Shape You Want

New Feature Dragging shapes from stencils works great as long as you can find the shape you want. What if you don’t see the right shape, though? Fortunately, there’s a great new tool for locating shapes. In Visio 2002 users could locate shapes using the Find Shape command under the File menu. Now the Shapes window on the left of the screen includes a Search For Shapes text box at the top, as Figure 2-5 shows. Simply type in your search request, press enter, and Visio searches all your installed stencils for shapes based on the keyword that you typed. The first time you conduct a search Visio asks if you would like to use the Indexing Service. If you agree your searches will be faster, but it may periodically degrade your system performance as the computer searches your hard drive and indexes files. If you’re connected to the Internet, Visio can look for new Visio shapes on the Web—both from Microsoft and third- party vendors.

Figure 2-5: The Search For Shapes text box lets you search for shapes among the stencils installed on your local hard drive as well as the Web if you’re connected to the Internet.

It helps to narrow the scope of your search by typing as many applicable keywords as possible. For example, if you type bus as the search word, you’ll get dozens of results ranging from the School Bus shape to the Bus Network shape.

The Search For Shapes text box searches for shapes based on keywords that are stored with the shapes. If you know a shape’s name, it might not be relevant—the name is not necessarily a keyword. You’re better off thinking of descriptive terms for the shape you want. In addition, Search For Shapes is very literal and only matches whole keywords based on the exact text you type. So if the plural form of a word does not work, try its singular form. You cannot use wildcard characters.

When you click the green arrow next to the Search For Shapes text box, Visio hunts through the stencils on your hard disk and, if you’re connected, on the Web. If it finds shapes that contain the keywords you typed, they’re displayed below the text box in the familiar template form (three columns of multiple shapes). The results include an icon and name, as Figure 2-6 shows. To use a shape, drag it from the Find Shapes pane onto your drawing page.

Figure 2-6: The Search For Shapes command displays results in a template-likeresults pane.

New Feature You can alter how and where Visio searches for the shapes on your computer. Click Tools, Options, and then click the Shape Search tab. Modify your search parameters and then click OK to save the changes and close the box.

Search For Shapes looks only at the stencils installed with Visio and on the Web. If you want to locate a shape that’s in your diagram somewhere, use the Find command on the Edit menu.