Having tackled organisational charts with Microsoft Visio last week, Trevor Eddolls explains more about the program's other features.
There's far more to Microsoft Office Visio than just drawing organisational charts. There are plenty of tools and techniques built in to Visio to make it a highly useful drawing program for people who have absolutely no drawing talent. And, of course, it is also very useful for people who can draw as well.
The real secret of Visio's success is that it makes use of stencils. Whatever shape you need - a box for that organisational chart, a desk in your new office layout, or the right shape for your flowchart - can be dragged from the stencil area onto the drawing area and connected together as necessary. It's then possible to add themes to the diagram to give it that final professional touch.
So let's take a look at how to achieve something useful with Visio.
Getting the right-sized shape in the right position
Dragging a shape from a stencil onto the drawing area is only half the story. You need to ensure that every item is to scale, particularly if you are redesigning the layout of an office. Then you need to ensure each item is in exactly the correct position.
Now most people do this by eye. They drag the shape to more-or-less where it should be and they grab the corner handles and stretch or shrink it to more-or-less the right size. There will come a time when that just isn't good enough. Perhaps when the last desk that appeared to fit in your diagram doesn't in the real world.
The solution is to add the Size and Position window to your drawing area. You can find this from the menu using View-Size & Position window. Now, drag a shape onto your drawing area. You may notice the pop-up help that appears whenever you leave your cursor hovering over anything.
As you move the shape, the values in the Size and Position window change. Once you let go of the shape the numbers remain constant. You can use these numbers to exactly control the size and location of the shapes in your diagram.
Simply by overtyping the numbers in the Size & Position window will change the size and position of the shape (see right). The effect on the shape in the diagram is immediate.
The wrong kind of shapes
Rail passengers will be familiar with the wrong kind of leaves (or snow!).
Visio users may very well find that the stencils available don't contain all the shapes that they need for the particular diagram they want to draw.
That's not an insurmountable problem. Using the menu, you can select File-New-Shapes and from there select the additional shapes you want (see the somewhat fuzzy screengrab right to get an idea of the menu layout).
Basic Shapes has lots of shapes that are typically needed.
As with everything in Microsoft's Office suite, there are many ways of achieving the same effect. As an alternative, you could click on the Shapes icon to get to the stencils:
You can't have too much of a good thing
Let's suppose that I add a desk, a computer, and finally a chair to a diagram I create of my office – see below.
Suppose that one office chair (or any other shape you have in your drawing area) needs to be duplicated. You can do this very easily by clicking on the object in order to select it, and then pressing Ctrl+D. You can duplicate a shape as many times as you want by repeatedly pressing Ctrl+D.
Tell me about yourself
If you're showing a diagram to different people over a period of time, it can get very dull repeatedly telling each person that this represents such-and-such a desk and those are the visitors' chairs, or whatever. The secret of retaining your sanity is to write what the shape is for in your diagram.
Labelling any shape in the drawing area is very easy. Firstly select the shape, and then start typing – it's as simple as that. The bad news is that the text is aligned with the object rather than being the right-way up – see left.
The good news is that the text rotates with the shape:
So, how can you get the desk the way round you want it and the text the right way round? The answer is to use a text box. From the menu, select Insert-Text box, or choose the letter A (the text box icon from the menu).
Click where you want the text box to go and drag the box to the size you want. Lastly, type in the text box – the letters will now be the right way up. You can group the two objects together by selecting both and Shape-Grouping-Group or using the keyboard, Shift+Ctrl+G.
Getting some guidance
One of the real problems that people who are not artistically gifted face is that objects they've drawn are all over the place. But, as always, help is at hand. If you want objects to line up exactly, you can do that simply by clicking on the rulers along the top or left-hand side of the drawing area and dragging down (or across). A green straight line will appear. You can have lots of lines so lots of different groups of shapes can be lined up at the same time. Existing guidelines become blue in colour when new ones are selected.
You are now at the stage where you could redesign your office layout – perhaps maximising the space between desks or making sure there are no wires running across the middle of the room. More ambitious users will want to try redesigning their lounge or bedroom, or even the kitchen!
More toolbars
You can get extra toolbars in the same way as with other Office products by clicking View-Toolbars and then selecting what you want. Let’s select Drawing. The small toolbar appears (see right). Click on any of the shapes in the toolbar and then go to the drawing area and you can draw a rectangle or ellipse. Interestingly, with the line tool, if you press shift the line will only draw horizontal, vertical, or at 45 degrees. Once you have drawn a shape, select the Pointer tool from the menu bar.
Click on a shape and you can modify it. You can also colour in the shapes (using the same icons from the menu you would use with the other Office products) and you can theme all new shapes (see below, right).
Many people use this as an opportunity to try drawing a picture and colouring it in. Even a little gingerbread person shape can be fun to colour in - and, of course, is a work-related activity!
Aligning and distributing shapes
Let's suppose that you have simply dragged all the shapes you needed onto the page, just to see whether they fit. You now want to organise them so they look tidy - and you don’t want to move each one separately and line it up by eye, and have to start again if you get it wrong.
First of all, you need to select all the shapes. This can be done in four ways. Click on the first shape and shift-click on the last one. You could use the lasso (from the drop-down arrow at the side of the Pointer tool icon in the menu – select Lasso). Simply draw around all the shapes you want to select. Thirdly, use Area Select (again from the drop-down menu at the side of the Pointer tool on the menu. You can then draw a box around the shapes required. Lastly press Ctrl+A at the same time to select all.
What else can you do with Visio?
Hopefully there are enough ideas here not only to get you started using Visio, but also to stimulate your imagination for lots of extra things you could be doing with the product. It really is a fun piece of software, and it can produce very useful business-oriented results. Feel free to add your tips, tricks and uses for Visio below.
About the Author
Trevor Eddolls is MD of iTech-Ed Ltd, a company specialising in IT consultancy and writing. He has more than 25 years of experience in all aspects of computing. He is a qualified Microsoft Office Specialist Master Instructor (MOS MI) and publishes a weekly blog, Mainframe Update.
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Dynamic charts ...
Good articles but perhaps one needs to take matters further with a final article showing the real power of Visio when used as a smart client being driven by databases or web services
Demonstrating such things as organisation charts (with drill down) generated on the fly