Creating an ERD with LucidChart

hey everyone I put together this video just to show you how to use the Lucid chart product to build your ER diagrams and what I'm looking at here is the homepage to the Lucid chart website and I'm running this out of the Chrome browser although it really shouldn't matter what browser that you're using but anyway what you want to do if this is your first time in you want to click the sign up free button and there are different options but basically if you start if you sign up for free with a single user option over on the right that really is sufficient for what we need we really don't need all this other stuff so you click sign up and I've already signed up so I already have my username and password but basically you type in your name your email and your password you click register and you might get an email just confirming your account but anyway it's pretty straightforward so once you've done that then you go back to their website and this time you click login and again I have my stuff already ready to go so I'm just going to click log in here and something like this will come up now I've already been using the product so yours might look a little different than mine but what you want to do here is start with a new document so up here on the left where it says plus document I'm going to click that and again because I've already used this it points me right to where I need to go but for you all what you want to do is click on standard template and the categories go down to entity relationship diagram or ERD now at this point you'll notice there's this hockey ERD this is a a template it's really just an example of a chart that you can build and if you select that and click Start drawing it actually gives you this drawing to start with and we don't really want that because then you have to go around and delete all of those things out so what I would suggest is that you just go right down to start drawing and click it make sure again that you have entity relationship selected here you click Start drawing and it takes a couple seconds your chart comes up you're asked to give it a title now it saves these write in Lucid chart in their system so that when you log in all of your charts are here if I were to just go in and name this example for c171 and hit okay I'm now ready to to actually start building now over on the left side you'll notice that there are different shape categories there's standard flowchart can containers shapes and so forth what you don't see here are the ER diagram symbols and if I close by clicking the X close some of these things out to give myself some room here um at the very bottom it says more shapes this button on the bottom left side if I click that this window comes up and what you want to do here is you want to go down to entity relationship and you want to check that box to turn on the entity relationship symbol set so you do that you come over here and click save and then those four symbols come up on the left side now for lesson two we're building ER diagrams but we're building data models so the data model symbol is the first one on the left side over here so basically what you'll do is you'll just take this thing and drag it onto your your page and this again is an entity and notice that you have some settings when you hover over this it turns darker I would suggest you turn on shaded header and if you want to do alternate row colors you can I'm just going to leave that alone you can uh specify how many fields that you want here and you don't have to get this number perfect perfect if you put the wrong number in you you can go in later and add or delete Fields out but if you do click manage Fields here you'll notice that you can name your Fields so if this was the employee table I could come in and name this thing give it you know first name last name and let's say I wanted to add another field like say I wanted to put salary in there I could hit the plus sign here and it could will it'll add a field and I can just type it in likewise the minus sign will delete a field once I hit okay it builds the entity and if you for any at any one time if you go in and double click on one of these attributes you can rename it if you want to delete a field you have to come over to manage fields and remove it this way or if you want to add one inside of some others you you come over here and hit the plus signs so you always go to manage Fields when you want to add or delete a field but if you just want to change the name of a field again you can just double click inside of the field and change it that way to name the entity you just double click inside of the the Box up at the top and type in your entity name so I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing for department so I'll type in my entity name I'll turn on the Shaded header I'll go to manage fields and I will put in Department ID and the name of the department and I don't need this field here so I want to set up a relationship between the two entities now in the chapter when you look at their diagrams theirs look a little different what they do is they put the name of the entity up above the Box just a little bit to the left and then in their shaded section they put the identifier for the entity the these diagrams don't really have that capability so what I would recommend is that you put you select the field that's your identifier double click it and click the B for bold so just in other words just make it bold you want to get fancy you can even set the color but you don't have to do that double click on the field click the B for bold you want to change the color uh feel free but not necessar to do and then anyway then you've got your your identifier field so just make them bold or colorize them or do something to them to make them stand out so that I know which field is the identifier for the entity so when it comes time to draw the relationship line between the two entities what you do is you hover up with your mouse on The Entity to that you want to start with select one of these circles and then just click it hold your mouse down and drag your arrow over to the Target and drop it on one of the dots of the target like that it'll put up a default Crow Foot symbol here which we want to change and to change it you simply click on the relation ship and you'll notice when you do that these two boxes will will show you select options so if I want to make a relationship here it's a one to many but the but these symbols are are backwards it should be one department has many employees what I can do is I can click this reverse button then I can switch it over like that but I want this to be a an optional participation relationship like this on the left side I want to say one and only one so now it'll it'll say the department can have zero or more employees in it an employee must be in one and only one department now you don't have to do this but usually it's nicer if you have room to put the one side of the relationship on the left of course if you do that you're going to have this problem so you want to take your your line and just move it and reconnect the dot so you click the line and you just move it over like this and you'll know you'll know it worked if you can move the entity and the line goes along with it so something like that now if you want to put a verb phrase into your your relationship you can do that by double clicking the line and then you can enter the verb phrase like this and if you want to do a forward and an inverse phrase you can type in the first one click a slash and then the second phrase like that but you don't have to do this verb phrase if you don't want to okay so let's say that we want to take this diagram and get it into word to uh submit our assignment well there are several ways to do this if you have a tool like snag it or if you are familiar with Windows Snipping Tool or you understand how to take a screen capture and crop the diagram that's a quick and easy way to do it you just select the item or you just take a a screenshot of the desktop and you crop it or or do whatever you got to do to to get that graphic into your document if you're not sure how to do that kind of thing you can use a publish capability within Lucid chart and it works like this you go up to file and you select public and you want to do an image but you don't want the entire page you just want part of the current page so what you do is you say you click on publish selection and you can either build a PNG or a JPEG it doesn't really matter either way you're going to be putting it into words so it doesn't matter the screen or print qu quality for what we're doing it it probably won't make much difference if you want to play around with with either one you certainly can do that I'll just choose print for right now and then you you click publish and then what you do it says here to click and drag to select part of the page so you just take the area that you want to publish and you just select it now if if you got so much stuff that you just want to grab the entire page you could have gone back and selected that option or you can zoom it down so that things are really small and publish it that way uh however you decide to do it you just want to select the region that you want to paste over like I've done here and once you've selected this if I go back up to file publish you'll notice that you have a link sitting down down here which connects you to a PNG file if I click on that it'll actually open up the the the um the drawing in another tab of my browser or I can just right click on it in my case in your case it might the menu might be a little bit different but save the link as and I can save it to my desktop which I've already done so it it puts a little one next to it there but anyway put it on my desktop and save it and then it's off the screen you can't see the file here but I I'll show it to you in a second now this will stay like this until you unpublish the region so I would have to click on on file go to publish and I can just delete that particular published region by clicking the X and confirming and then it will take away the highlighted section that I just published but like I said if if you want to get the entire page you can choose PDF image and click publish page as well so you have a lot of options however you do it basically you need that that graph so at this point I'm going to go ahead and bring up the image so that's my file you know it's a PNG file so basically if you open up a product like Microsoft Word you could you go into word and you can say you know um assignment two and then you could say exercise one and then let's see in word if I want to inserted a picture um I can insert a photo now this is this is Microsoft Word for Mac so yours will certainly be different if you're running in Windows but anyway I pick my image and then I just insert it into my document like this now again you can play around with this you can crop it and experiment with it but basically you want to give me a graphic like something like that in your document for each of your exercises so that's the plan so however whatever method you come up with to accomplish this and if it works for you then just stick with it so a lot of ways to do this but if you have problems or you don't know how to do something run into a snag obviously you know just let me know and I'll walk you through it or help you out with it so hopefully this helps you and gives you a good feel for how to build these models in Lucid chart and put them into your Your Word documents one final comment if I were to close this file here you'll notice that it all the stuff I've built stays here in my collection of documents so I can come in here and I can delete these out and manage it that way so I basically it stores your your diagrams in here for you for later use there's a lot more things I could show I could show you how to play with colors and shapes and things like that if you have time and you want to play around obviously feel free to do that but as long as you get those basic things done for an assignment you're going to be all set so hope you found this helpful and we'll talk to you soon in another video thanks for watching

Channel: Tim Koets

Views: 94,374

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Id: 9L0CMnDGuLg

Length: 17min 17sec (1037 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 19 2015