3. Working with Basic Diagrams

Visio is all about making great visuals, and you will spend a lot of time focused on the drawings themselves. This chapter provides a good point to step back and see all the other features of Visio that will help you later as you work on those drawings. Consider how choosing the right canvas and frame can make a great work of art look awesome.

Templates, file formats, pages, backgrounds, and your work area are all fundamental to having the right canvas and frame for the drawings you create. We look at templates and the drawing window in detail in this chapter. Chapter 4, “Taking Control of Your Diagrams,” considers how pages and backgrounds further accentuate your work.

Templates serve a similar purpose. No one questions your imagination and artistic abilities, and you certainly can create drawings from scratch in Visio if that is your preference. You will quickly appreciate the many advantages of using templates when you see how they save you time.

When you choose to start a new Visio diagram, you are presented with featured templates by default. You can refine the choices by using categories, which presents eight groups of templates as shown in Figure 3.2 (Business, Engineering, Flowchart, General, Maps and Floor Plans, Network, Schedule, and Software and Database).

In addition you can search for online templates. We’ll come back to this feature later in this chapter.

Take a look at the purpose of these categories and what sets them apart from each other.

• Business templates include Organization Charts, Marketing, and Charts and Graphs. You find tools for analyzing processes such as Cause and Effect or Fault Tree. Many people have learned to use mind mapping or brainstorming diagrams.

• Engineering offers several templates, including Basic Electrical and Part and Assembly Drawing (see Figure 3.3).

• Flowchart templates include the Basic Flowchart, BPMN Diagram, and Workflow Diagrams.

• General includes Basic Diagram and Block Diagrams. This is a good area to start with if the diagram only needs very basic shapes and stencils.

• Maps and Floor Plans include many types of templates. You can create 2D or 3D map graphics for advertising, floor plans and layouts, detailed HVAC, ceiling grids, and site plans.

• Network templates include ways to represent the physical network, rack diagrams, and more conceptual diagrams to visualize Active Directory or LDAP Directories.

• Schedule templates provide tools for calendars, Gantt charts, and timelines.

• Software and Database has many templates, such as Data Flow, Database Notation, Program Structure, and Web Site Map.

When you select a specific template, a small window appears (see Figure 3.4) with a few details related to the purpose of the template and its origin. You can choose to use Metric or U.S. units of measurement and then select Create. You can also scroll to the left or right, clicking arrows to browse other templates.

→ To learn how to create your own templates in Visio, see page 252.

If you have been working in Visio and want to create a new drawing, follow these steps:

1. Select the File tab to open the Backstage area.

2. Select New from the vertical menu to the left. You see the list of featured templates to the right.

3. Select Blank Drawing and Create on the pop-up window that appears. Blank drawings open with no shapes, stencils, or any other configuration settings (see Figure 3.5). You can still work right away, selecting shapes and such from the Home tab and the Tools menu.

1. Open Visio and look for the list labeled Recent off to the left.

2. Right-click a file and select Open a copy as shown in Figure 3.6. (The link at the bottom of Recent files labeled Open Other Drawings will take you to the Recent Drawing list discussed in the next set of steps.)

3. Notice a copy has opened with a name like Drawing1. Any alterations to this drawing will have no effect on the original; they are completely separate.

4. To save this copy, Select File and Save As to assign a unique name and location.

If the drawing is not listed in the Recent Drawing list, open it first so you have the option to right-click as described.

There is another way to get to this list of recent drawings:

1. Select the File tab and then select Open.

2. As shown in Figure 3.7, helpful thumbnails display when you view the list in this way.

3. Right-click a drawing and select Open a copy.

If you anticipate using a drawing as a base for future copies or just want to keep it handy, you can also pin the drawing to the Recent Drawing list. As you hover your mouse over the document in the Recent list, you see a pushpin to the right. As shown in Figure 3.6, when you click the pin you see the document pinned to the top of this list until you unpin it.

→ To find recommendations for online templates and samples, see page 311.

A new feature in Visio 2013 is the inclusion of SkyDrive as a location to save your work. This cloud-based location is associated with your Live ID. When saved to this SkyDrive, you can access the content from any computer with Internet access, and you can even share files from your SkyDrive.

→ To learn more about sharing your drawings using SkyDrive, see page 230.

When you use Save As, you can choose the file format that you want to use. As you can see in Figure 3.9, there are many formats to choose from. The default is named Visio Drawing; it is a new format and uses the .vsdx file extension. The Visio 2003–2010 Drawing format choice may be practical when sharing drawings with others who use older versions of Visio.

→ To learn more about other formats, see page 235.

1. Click the Home tab to access the Backstage area.

2. Click Options at the bottom of the vertical menu on the left.

3. Select Save under Visio Options and verify your settings.

4. Click OK to save changes.

In Figure 3.10, you see the setting options for Save. Here you can change the default format using the Save Files in This Format drop-down menu. Save AutoRecover Information Every X Minutes allows you to enable and change the default of 10 minutes to a shorter period of time. It is not enabled by default. To minimize the amount of work that can be lost due to a power outage or because a computer suddenly stopped working, some people change this to 5 minutes or even less. If the file itself is extremely large or complex you might notice a slight hit on performance. If that happens then increase the interval. You may prefer to enable or disable other settings here if you desire to further fine-tune your save experience.

The Visio application is itself a window and can be moved, resized, and minimized, like any Microsoft application. This application window includes the tabbed ribbon interface. The main Visio application window can contain any open Visio files, the same as modern web browsers allow for multiple tabbed web pages in one window. You might notice what appear to be several stacked windows on the Windows task bar; they are likely all contained in one Visio application window. For this reason the ribbon and tabs across the top do not appear to alter when changing from one diagram or drawing window to another.

Drawing windows refer to the work area below the ribbon interface where you create your diagrams and drawings. Drawing windows can be minimized, maximized, and arranged below the tabbed ribbon bar.

• Shapes

• Shape Data

• Pan and Zoom

• Size and Position

In the Show section of the View tab you can enable or disable task panes by clicking the Task Panes drop-down button and selecting to toggle it on or off. In Figure 3.11 you can see four task panes listed. Shapes and Pan & Zoom are toggled on and can be seen below in the drawing window.

The Shapes task pane we used previously and by default is turned on anytime we open a new drawing window. It is docked on the left side of the window by default.

You may see other task panes occasionally, and some are unique to certain templates. They all can be moved, docked to the edge of a drawing window, resized, and anchored to the edges of a drawing window. Anchoring the pane allows you to automatically hide (Auto Hide) them so they fly open only when you hover over them.

• New Window

• Arrange All

• Cascade

• Switch Windows

To quickly jump between windows, you may be able to use Ctrl+Tab on the keyboard. Another option is to click Arrange All to split the available screen space among the open drawings. This provides a way to see a portion of all open drawings, as shown in Figure 3.12. You might use this to compare drawings side by side.

You can also select the Cascade button to see the open windows arrayed by their Title bar (see Figure 3.13). This can be useful when you have many open drawings and you need to quickly find a specific one. When you select the drawing you want, you can maximize the drawing window by double clicking the Title bar or by using the traditional Windows maximize button located in the upper-right corner of the window. This also removes the cascade effect.

Use the New Window button to open a second view of the current drawing. You are not making a copy; you have an additional drawing window to the same drawing. Changes made in the first window are seen in the second, and vice versa. This can be useful when working with a large diagram; one window can focus on one area, and the second can position over another area. Now you can jump between drawing windows rather than move back and forth on the diagram. Notice how this is used in Figure 3.14; both Kitchen Remodel:1 and Kitchen Remodel:2 are different views of the same drawing arranged side by side.

You are not able to modify the drawing while in full screen, but you can evaluate how the finished product will look. You can navigate through multiple pages by right-clicking and using the Go To menu or by using your arrow keys.