Microsoft Visio 2019 Tutorial: Visio Crash Course!

subscribe and click the bell icon to turn on notifications we've made the accompanying exercise files for this tutorial available for free just click the link below in the video details to get these hello everyone and welcome to this course on vizio 2019 my name is deb and i'm your instructor on this course and i've been using vizio for many years both in some of the work that i've done and also in a personal context now i'm sure you're keen to get started with this course but before we do i need to cover some important introductory material with you both about the addition of visio that we're going to be using and also the structure of this course so first let's talk about who this course is for well i've tried to structure this course in a way that's suitable for beginners but also useful for people who have used an earlier version i will say though that if you have used a reasonably recent bar earlier version of vizio there might be certain lessons in this course that you can skip however if you are an absolute beginner then don't worry we're going to be starting from scratch but i will be making some assumptions i'm going to assume that you're reasonably familiar with the windows interface so i won't be explaining how to use windows or what dialogues are things like that i am largely going to assume that you've used the office ribbon interface in other products so you might be more familiar with the ribbon in products such as word excel powerpoint or even outlook if you're not familiar with it then don't worry because i am going to cover that in a separate section now i should also point out that if your experience is with visio 2010 or earlier then chances are you will need to cover a lot of this course as 2010 is when that ribbon was introduced so the version we use now looks very different to those much older versions even if you have used 2010 there were a lot of changes in vizio in 2013. so the leap from 2010 to where we are currently is a pretty big one now saying that the jump from 2013 to vizio 2016 and then 2019 is not such a big leap there are some cosmetic changes and a bit of enhanced functionality but generally there's not too much difference at all now if you are completely new to vizio you might not even know what physio is well it's basically a diagram tool we're going to use it to draw diagrams or what are sometimes known as drawings however over its history and it's about 25 years old now it has developed beyond only being a diagram tool for example you can do things like model processes with it and you can also use it for things like data visualization now all of these aspects will be covered in this course but if you would like some introductory reading so that you have more of an idea of what vizio is all about then it is worth jumping onto the microsoft.com website and just having a little read through these different sections now i would like to point out with these pages on the microsoft websites they do tend to update these pages fairly frequently so what you're seeing on my screen now might be entirely different if you're viewing this course in six months a year's time so just be aware of that now another page that is sometimes really useful to check out is the vizio blog this is where you'll find a lot of the latest information related to vizio and it really helps you keep on top of all the different changes and it also means that you can see comments underneath the blogs which can sometimes be really useful if you're looking for a particular piece of information or trying to find a resolution to a problem another useful place on office.com is the vizio help center so not only does this give you access to help but it also links you through to microsoft training courses about the use of vizio now the training materials on office.com tend to be less detailed than the course that we're going to cover and i also tend to cover a wider range of aspects of functionality but there is some really useful stuff on here if you look down at trending topics for example if you weren't sure how to create a basic flowchart there is a link for that just here and that's going to link you through to an instructional guide and a step-by-step process of how to do this so loads of information in this help center now throughout this course i'm going to be using vizio 2019 professional the desktop version now aside from professional there is also a vizio standard version now if you have vizio standard then most things on this course you're going to be able to cover no problem but there are a small number of things that you won't have in your version but as i said it is very very minimal just a couple of little items so you should still be able to work through this course without too much issue now one other thing to note despite the fact that i am in the uk as you can probably tell from the accent i'm going to be using us locale when working in vizio so that means that things like currency date and spelling will all be in us format now all of the files that you see me use in the demo videos are available for you to download from the course files folder so you can follow along and throughout this course there will be a number of exercises where you can practice the skills you have learnt so far and you'll find all of the files that you need to complete these exercises in the exercises folder so make sure you download all of the files prior to starting the course and if you ever get a little bit confused as to which file i'm using remember just look up in the title bar of the visio drawing in the video and you should see the document title listed there so with all that said let's move on to the next lesson in this introductory section where i'm going to briefly talk to you about how you can acquire vizio if you don't already have it that's it for now once again my name is deb and i am absolutely thrilled to be hosting this course for you today hello everyone and welcome back to this course on vizio 2019 i'd like to start out by just running through how you can acquire vizio if you don't already have it on your pc because you might have noticed that if you are a microsoft 365 subscriber visio isn't actually included in your package or your suite of applications so if you do want to use it you're going to have to pay for it and download it separately and there are various different routes or ways that you can download this software and it really depends if you want to purchase it as a subscription and pay a low monthly fee or if you just want to buy outright as a one-time download so let's take a look at the different options that we have i've just loaded up a microsoft edge browser and i'm just going to type in vizio 2019 professional download so let's first take a look at the different plans that you have when it comes to vizio now the two plans here are both subscription plans one of them is limited to the web version only and the other one allows you to download the full desktop app so you could choose one of these options and buy it from the microsoft website alternatively if you just want to download the full application have it on your pc then you might be more interested in the vizio standard 2019 download or the vizio professional 2019. now in this course i'm going to be using vizio professional simply because it has the full range of features so if we click on this let's take a look at what we have so this is the full vizio professional 2019 version and you can see that this is quite an expensive product now if you're just a home user and you need to create diagrams then you may prefer to go for the vizio standard 2019 which we have a link for just here and you can see that whilst there is about half the price it's still pretty expensive now i will say that obtaining vizio from the microsoft website is not your only option there are plenty of third-party suppliers which offer product keys and downloads for vizio at a greatly reduced price now i'm going to leave it up to you to do your own research and i don't want to push certain websites on anyone but i will say that a site that i use all the time for this type of download is a site called brightsoft i've downloaded many of the microsoft applications from here and you'll see that the price is a lot cheaper than the microsoft website so i definitely recommend that you do your own research but whichever way you choose to download it if you are going to go for a third party installation make sure that it is a reputable source now when you do purchase a copy of visio in this way you're essentially purchasing a product key so for example when i purchased it from this website i received an email that contained my product key number and instructions on how to download the software and it basically involves clicking on a link which is going to take you to the microsoft website and then it's going to ask you to enter in your product key to download and once you download you're going to get something that looks like this office officesetup1.xe double click to run it and it's going to install visio now whilst you're going through the installation process you might get a pop-up window that basically asks you to switch to the 64-bit version and the setup process basically guides you through the installation of vizio so it's reasonably straightforward now in this course i'm using vizio 2019 professional i've already downloaded it onto my pc so let's just check to make sure that it's installed correctly i'm going to go down to my search bar at the bottom here and i am using windows 10 so if you're using windows 8 8.1 or something older then this might be slightly different but just go down to where you would normally go to search for applications type in visio and if it's installed you should see it sitting there right at the top of your list and it's from this point that we're going to pick up the next lesson i'm going to show you how you can launch vizio how you can make it easily accessible from your taskbar and also introduce you to the start screen so i'm going to head over there now and i look forward to you joining me hello everyone and welcome back to the course now we've seen how we can acquire or download visio 2019 onto our pcs we're now going to take a look at launching vizio and i'm going to just guide you around the start screen which is basically the first screen that opens when you launch vizio now as i said i'm using windows 10 so in order to open visio i'm going to go down to my search bar at the bottom and just type in visio so i can see it there at the top of my list and all i need to do is click to launch it however before i do that i want to make my life a little bit easier when i'm launching vizio in the future because i don't really want to have to come into the start menu search for the application in order to load it up i want to make it super simple to open now there's a couple of ways that i can do that if i right click on my application you can see i have a couple of options in there pin to start and pin to taskbar so i can pin this application to my start screen and i can also pin it to the taskbar and the taskbar is the bar that you can see running across the bottom of my screen that currently has lots of other applications that i use frequently pinned to it so i'm going to say pin to taskbar and you can now see the icon has appeared and i'm just going to move that across but what i can also do if i just quickly search for it again is right click and say pin to start so what that means is that whenever i click my start icon in the corner you can see that i have visio listed just here now you don't have to pin to both start and the taskbar you can choose one or the other depending on what suits you best so now that i've pinned it i can click to open and when you first open up visio it's going to jump you into the start screen and if this is a brand new download as mine is you might see the microsoft office activation wizard so this just says thank you for installing microsoft vizio professional activation is required to authenticate this copy of microsoft office the wizard will guide you through the activation process so i'm going to choose this option i want to activate the software over the internet and click on next and very quickly it just tells me that my copy is now activated so i'm going to say close and i can now see my start screen now this start screen is normally the first thing you see when you open up physio now i will say that you can suppress this start screen if you want to which means that when you launch vizio you're not going to see this screen it's just going to jump you straight into the main application and i'm going to show you how you can suppress the start screen in a moment now all the start screen really is is a way of accessing recently open drawings other drawings or creating new ones and you can see right at the top here underneath this new heading we have various different diagrams or different blocks that we can load up and these are really the most commonly used diagrams so for example if i decided that i wanted to create an organization chart i can click on the relevant block and it's going to pull up a panel that shows the available styles of this chart along with a short description it also shows me a download size so this is very small and it lets me choose if i want to work with this chart in metric units or us units and i'm going to work in us units for the duration of this course so let's select this first one just here which is the organization chart wizard so this is basically going to use a wizard to create diagrams for human resources management staff organization office administration and management structures once i've selected my template essentially i can click on create and it's going to open it up in the main visio interface and you can see with this one it's an organization chart wizard and there are various different ways that you can create organization charts for example i can use information that's already stored in a file or database or i can use information that i enter using the wizard now i'm not going to walk you through this process at the moment because we're going to do a whole section on organization charts so i'm going to cancel on this window so currently what i have is just an empty organization chart and what you can see in the title bar is that by default this file has been called drawing one now what i'm going to do first is i'm going to save this chart into the course files folder now before i do that i'm just going to add one shape onto my canvas so i'm just going to drag this one here and place it into the middle just so that we have something in this diagram so now that i've done that i'm going to save this drawing so for this we jump up to the file tab which takes us into what we call the backstage area and backstage is really where you'll find all of your admin style tasks so this is where you come if you want to create new diagrams if you want to open diagrams that you have stored locally you can also save from here you can print you can share with other people and even export your diagrams now we're going to look at this backstage area in a lot more detail that's really just a high level overview of the kinds of things that you can see in here now for us at the moment we want to save our visio diagrams so i'm going to select save as and this is now going to present me with different locations which i can browse and search for folders now because this is a new installation of visio and i haven't used it yet this is the first time i'm using it you can see it says you have no recent folders now as i start saving things into various different folders these will appear on the right hand side to make it a lot quicker for me to save into the same folders so let's click on browse and i'm going to navigate to the course files folder i'm going to give my drawing a name so let's call this my first org chart it's saving it as a visio drawing file type which is dot vsdx and all i need to do here is click on save and what you'll now see is if you look up in the title bar that's now changed from the default of diagram 1 to myfirst.orgchart.vsdx so i know that that's been saved successfully now what i'm going to do here is i'm going to close down visio and i can do that very simply by clicking the cross in the top right hand corner and that's going to close the entire application let's restart visio using our icon on the taskbar so now what you'll notice when that start screen opens up is that the last file that i created and saved is now listed under recent so this makes it really quick and easy to find and open files that i've used recently and the last drawing or diagram that you accessed is always going to be at the top of that list so this list essentially is dynamic as it changes according to your activity now it might be that you have specific diagrams that you access all the time and you don't particularly want to have to scroll up and down a long list of files trying to find them so what you can do is you can pin documents to the top of the list which means they're always going to stay there no matter how many different files you open now if you do want to pin any diagrams it's a simple process of hovering over the file and you'll see in the middle a little pin icon and it says pin this item to the list so i can click this and it's now pinned to the top of this list you'll also see that you have another section just here which is going to show all of the items that you have pinned so a really nice quick way of finding your most important drawings now i will say that there's only a certain amount of drawings that will appear in your recent list and that's very much determined by what you have it set to in your visio options so i'm going to quickly jump into options which you'll find right at the bottom in the menu on the left hand side and in options you have a number of different pages now if we jump into the advanced page and scroll all the way down underneath display you can see it says show this number of recent documents and mine set to 50. and if i hover over the information icon it says show this number of recent documents so i can hold 50. if i find that's a bit too many i can take this down using these scroll arrows or i can keep it at 50. and you'll notice that i can't go any higher than 50 so 50 is the maximum now some of the other things that i can do within this start screen is i could click on open and this is going to allow me to open any drawings that i have saved so once again you can see underneath drawings it's got my pinned drawing on the right hand side but if i need to open a drawing that maybe isn't listed in my recent list then i can browse and pick that up from a different location i can also create new drawings from here as well so right at the top here i have three new templates that i can use i can choose the basic diagram which is probably one of the most common blank drawings so i can build my own diagram from scratch and then it's also showing me the organization chart which is the last one that i used and what you'll notice is that as i hover over these they also have their own pin icon so if i use an organization chart all the time i can pin this to the front of the list as well then underneath there we have various different templates available for us to load up and there are many many different templates available including a selection online so from here you can search for specific templates and underneath this search bar you'll notice some suggested searches so if i was looking for let's say a flowchart i can click on the flowcharts link it's going to search through the templates and pull back everything that's tagged as a flowchart and i can then go in and choose whichever template i want to use now if i want to get back to the previous screen i have a little backer at the top here which is going to take me back now don't think that you're just limited to these suggested searches you can search for your own template by typing in a keyword so for example if i type in the word project and hit the enter key that's going to go away and search for all templates that are related or tagged with the word project now what i'm going to do is i'm going to go back to open and we're going to open my first org chart once again so all i need to do is double click and that's going to open up in the main vizio interface and what i'm actually going to do is re-save this file as a different name so let's go back up to file which takes us into that backstage area down to save as and what you'll now see in here is that this is no longer empty because i've saved a file so now it's showing me the folders that i've saved into today and once again if i always use these folders i can choose to pin these to the top of the list now i know that i'm going to be saving into the course files folder fairly frequently so i'm going to click the drawing ping icon just to pin that to the top so let's double click on this folder and let's save this as my second org chart and click on save you'll now see that the title changes to my second org chart and i haven't overwritten the first one the other file is still there this is a brand new diagram now when you've finished working within a diagram and you want to close it down if you click on the cross in the top right hand corner you're basically going to close down all of visio and it might be that you just want to close down this particular file but keep visio open so in order to do that again you go back to file to jump into that backstage area and you'll notice in the menu right at the bottom we have a close option so let's click it it's going to close down that file but it hasn't closed down visio now the final thing i want to show you in this lesson is something i mentioned right at the start and that is how to suppress that start screen so again we're going to go back into file and we're going to select options at the bottom now as i mentioned before we have lots of different pages in here and you'll find this option on the general page right at the bottom underneath the startup options group so it says show the start screen when this application starts so i'm going to take the tick out of this box and click on ok and i'm going to close down all of visio let's reopen and see what happens and you'll see now instead of getting the start screen it takes me directly into the application so that might be something that you want to customize from the get go so that's a quick whistle stop tour of the start screen and some of the functionality that's it for this lesson i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to the course in this lesson we're going to explore the ribbon and if you've used other microsoft products like excel or word or even something like outlook then you may be very familiar with the ribbon structure and i will say that if you do know what the ribbon is and how it works then you can probably skip this lesson however if this is the first time you're coming across the ribbon then stay tuned because we're going to find out all about it now the ribbon appears at the top of the window and the ribbon structure was introduced in vizio in 2010 and it was actually slightly later than the other microsoft products and the ribbon basically contains numerous different tabs and those tabs contain all of the commands that you need to work with vizio and i will say that what you see on my ribbon might differ slightly to what you see on yours because what you see and how it's laid out is very much dependent on things like your screen resolution and your screen size now you'll have all of the same commands available they just might be organized slightly differently so just bear that in mind another point worth noting is that the commands and ribbons that you see is very much dependent on the addition of visio that you're using so i'm using visio professional which contains some commands that the standard vizio version doesn't contain now as i mentioned the ribbon is made up of a number of tabs and you can see currently i'm clicked on the home tab i also have an insert tab a draw tab a design tab data process review view and help and these tabs will appear and disappear depending on what you're doing now if we just click on the home tab what you'll see is that your commands are divided down into different groups and you can see the group name at the bottom so we have working from the left clipboard font paragraph tools so on and so forth and within the group we have numerous different relevant commands and these commands can take on various different formats they might just be a button that you can click on some of these have drop down lists some have things like radio buttons scroll buttons things like that so they're not all exactly the same now one thing you will notice is that currently all of my commands are disabled so they're all showing in grey and i can't actually click on anything now the reason why they're all disabled at the moment is because i don't have a diagram or a drawing open so let's do that first of all i'm going to jump up to file and i'm going to go down to open and helpfully i have my first organization chart pinned to the top of my recent documents so i'm going to click to open this and you'll now see if we jump back to that home ribbon that now all of my commands are available for me to use what you'll also notice is that i now have an additional tab and it's this one here org chart so as i've opened this vizio has recognized that this is an organization chart template and it's given me a specific ribbon related to this particular diagram type with all of the commands i'm going to need and this particular ribbon also has its own groups with its own commands contained within now you will see that whilst most of these commands are now active i still do have a few that are grayed out so for example in this picture group whilst insert is active change delete and show hide a grayed out and that's because these require me to make a selection before i can use them so if i now click on my shape you'll see that they then become active so i can now delete this shape change it or show hide so your commands very much depend on where you're currently clicked now let's click on our shape that we have in here and i'm going to jump across to the home tab now it might be that i want to change the style of this shape and you'll see right in the middle here i have a whole bunch of different shape styles now let me just move this over so you can see it underneath that gallery and what you'll notice is that as i hover over these different styles and fill backgrounds you can see that we get what we call a live preview so i can see what this effect is going to look like on the shape before i actually apply it so let's change the color of this shape so live preview is something you'll see fairly frequently and it's really useful because it just helps you make a decision before you actually apply it now let's move on to taking a look at another couple of really important controls i'm going to jump across to the view tab and introduce you to this zoom group because when you're working in visio and you're doing things that are quite granular and you need to be very detail-orientated and accurate zoom is going to be your best friend it allows you to zoom in to your drawing and see things in greater detail so if we click on zoom it's going to bring up this zoom box so you can choose your level of magnification so what i could do here is maybe select 200 percent and click on ok and it's going to zoom into my drawing to 200 percent let's click on zoom again so i'm going to click on 100 which is the actual size and i find that this is quite a nice size to work with however if you want to see the entire canvas the entire drawing you could choose the fit to window option and there is a keyboard shortcut for this of shift control w so let's click on fit to window and you can see it fits the entire canvas into the space you can also zoom in by page width which means it's going to stretch that canvas across the entire width of the screen now for the time being i'm just going to go back to fit to window another way that you can zoom into your diagram is by using the zoom slider at the bottom of the screen so all the way over in the corner you can see this little bar which allows you to zoom in and out of your diagram so if i grab the zoom slider and drag it up i can zoom into whatever percentage of magnification that i like now another thing i might want to consider doing fairly early on is setting the orientation and also the paper size now if we jump across to the design tab this is where you'll find your page setup options in this first group just here so if i click the drop down underneath orientation you can see that currently mine's set to landscape but if i prefer to work in portrait then i can simply select portrait from that drop down menu and it's going to resize my paper another thing that i would advise you to check is what you have set underneath this size option because you may well want to work with drawings that are on the correct size of paper so you can see that mine is currently set to letter size which is the standard paper size in the us whereas in the uk where i'm from we would be more likely to use a4 as our standard paper size now i'm going to choose letter but wherever you're located whatever paper you tend to print on whatever paper you tend to use make sure you have that set underneath this size option now so far we've just got one lonely object on our diagram so let's add another shape and if you take a look over in the left hand side you can see i have a shapes pane and i can simply drag and drop any shapes onto my canvas but i'm going to click more shapes at the top here so i get a little pop-out menu i'm going to go down to general and i'm going to load up my basic shapes so you can see once i do that i get a completely new palette essentially of what vizio considers to be basic shapes that i can then add to my diagram so i'm going to drag and drop just a very basic rectangle and i'm going to zoom in a little bit so this is easier for you to see now once again i'm going to jump across to the home tab and this time i'm going to go to the shape styles group and select the fill drop down and this is going to open up a palette of colors and again you'll see as i hover over i get that live preview now the colors that you see in the top area here underneath the theme colors heading are controlled by the theme that you have applied and i'm going to talk more about that a little bit later on in the course and then at the bottom we have what we call standard colors so let's just go in and select this gold orange fill i'm then going to go back up to my shape styles and this time i'm going to choose line and this controls the outline of the shape so i might want to do a let's do a green color but you can see that that outline is very very thin i'm going to make that a little bit thicker by again clicking the line drop down going to weight and selecting a much thicker line so reasonably simple to format any shapes that you add to the canvas now something else i might want to add is a text box so let's jump up to the insert tab and in general what you'll see on this tab are things that you can insert into your diagram if we take a look at the text group on the end we have a drop down for text box and i can choose to draw a horizontal or a vertical text box so i'm going to select horizontal my cursor changes to a small cross and then if i click and drag i've essentially created a text box my cursor is flashing so let's just type text box and what i can do from here is i can then go in and format this text so let's select the text and we find all of our formatting options on that home tab so in the font group just here i'm going to change the font to let's say britannic bold i'm going to increase the font size so i can either choose something from this drop down or i can increase the font size by clicking on this little a button and you'll also see there is a keyboard shortcut for this of shift control period so i'm just going to use this button to make this text a little bit bigger and i can also change the color of this text as well so let's change that to a dark blue color click away to deselect the text box so these are the typical kinds of operation that you might perform on shapes and as i mentioned at the beginning the commands that you see on these ribbons may vary depending on the screen resolution that you have now fortunately if you're not seeing all of the commands that i'm seeing you can still access them from within visio so for example if i click in this text box and just click to highlight that text i can access all of the options that i have regarding font formatting by opening up the advanced dialog box for this particular group and what you'll notice is that in the corner of some of these groups you have a little diagonal arrow so if i click on this one in the corner of the font group it's going to open up my full range of font formatting options so i can change the font from here i can change the style if i want it to be bold or italic i can change the size and i can also do some additional things that i can't actually do from the ribbon so these dialog box launchers basically contain all of the options all of the commands for the group even if you can't see them on the ribbon so just be aware of that now the final thing i want to talk about in this lesson is just making selections because one thing you will notice is that in order to perform an action on anything within a diagram you need to select it first so vizio knows which one you want to perform the action on so if i click on this rectangle you can see that i get a selection box around the outside with these little circles and these are referred to as resize handles and as you can imagine these resize handles allow you to resize your shape so as i hover over i get a diagonal arrow i even get a little pop out that tells me that this is going to resize the shape and i can just drag the corner out to make it larger or drag it in to make it smaller i can use this one to drag down and drag up you can also select single or multiple objects so i have the rectangle selected but if i also wanted to select the text box if i hold down my control key and click it's going to select both of them and then any actions i apply are going to apply to both of these selected items so if i jump up to fill you'll see that as i hover over the palette it's changing the background fill for both of the objects that i have selected and if you want to deselect both of them just click somewhere else on the canvas now it's also worth noting that you can have more than one drawing open at once so i'm going to jump up to file and go down to new and i'm just going to select blank drawing let's click on create to open that up now because i didn't close my last drawing down the new drawing drawing 1 has opened up over the top so if i want to switch quickly back to my organization chart if i jump up to the view tab you'll see we have a switch windows option in here and this is going to list everything that you have open in visio and if you want to switch between charts then you can just click on my first org chart and it's going to switch you back to there i can go to drawing 1 so on and so forth so the final thing i'm going to do here is switch back to this drawing i created and i'm just going to close it down that's it for this lesson i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to the course in this lesson we're going to talk about the quick access toolbar and i'm going to show you how you can customize it now again if you are used to using the quick access toolbar in other microsoft applications then you can probably skip this lesson however if the quick access toolbar is not familiar to you then carry on watching now the quick access toolbar is just a way for you to access commands that you use frequently quickly so as we've seen all of the commands are spread out across all of these different ribbon tabs so in order to access a specific command then you have to remember which ribbon it's on and whilst that knowledge will come over time when you're first learning vizio or microsoft products in general trying to remember which ribbon your commands are located on can be a bit time consuming so you can make your life a lot easier by adding commands that you use frequently to the quick access toolbar now if you're wondering where this magical toolbar is it's located right at the top of the screen in the top left hand corner and it's this little bar up here which has a few different icons on it by default now let's first talk about the position of this toolbar by default you're going to find it shoved all the way in the top left hand corner now you might be completely happy with it there as it is quite out of the way but if you would prefer this to be a little bit easier to access a little bit more visible you can move it to underneath your ribbons that's exactly what i'm going to do because i prefer to have it down here so at the end of this quick access toolbar you'll see a little drop down arrow when you hover over it it says customize quick access toolbar and we're going to jump all the way down to the last option where it says show below the ribbon and now it's moved to here now as i said you don't have to do that it's just my personal preference now by default you will have a number of different commands already on your quick access toolbar so again these are things that microsoft has determined you're going to use frequently so we have the save button on here we have the undo button which will undo the last action that you applied and you'll notice that the undo button also has a drop down so you can go back numerous different steps and these are all the last steps that i have taken we have a redo button so you can repeat your last action and then we also have a way of switching between mouse and touch mode so if you are somebody who uses vizio on a touch screen device so maybe a laptop or even a tablet you can switch into touch mode which is basically going to give you a little bit more space between your commands to allow for your finger now i'm working on a laptop and i'm going to use mouse mode now what you can also do here is you can customize this quick access toolbar and add on to it any commands that you like so again if we click this drop down you'll see that there are 10 or so items listed in this menu and the ones that are currently ticked are the ones that i have on my quick access toolbar and these are basically commands again that microsoft have deemed most useful so if you find yourself opening documents all the time or running a spell check all the time you can click on spelling and add that command to your quick access toolbar and this saves you from jumping across to the review tab and clicking on the spelling icon from there now what you'll notice in this drop down is that there are only 10 commands what if you want to add the bold command or maybe the copy command or the fill command or something from another tab well you can actually add anything you like to this quick access toolbar and there are a couple of different ways that you can do this now by far the easiest and quickest way is simply to hover over the command that you want to add so in this case i'm going to add copy right click your mouse and you'll see you have an option to add to the quick access toolbar very simple very straightforward i'm going to right click on bold and i'm also going to add that to the quick access toolbar maybe i find that i am constantly filling shapes with color i'm going to right click on the fill tool and i'm going to say add to quick access toolbar so i can essentially build my own toolbar of commands that i access frequently to make my life a lot easier now another thing that's worth bearing in mind is that not all commands that are available in vizio have an icon on the ribbons so if you want to see the full list of commands if you click the drop down and jump into more commands it's basically going to take you into visio options and to the quick access toolbar page now what you'll see on the right hand side is essentially your quick access toolbar and all of the commands that you currently have on it and then on the left hand side this is where you can choose other commands to add and these commands are organized into different groups so what i'm currently seeing here are all of the popular commands however if i wanted to see just the commands that are not located on any of the ribbons i could choose to show the commands not in the ribbon and this opens up a whole world of different commands that don't have icons on the ribbon and if i want to add any of these to my quick access toolbar all i need to do is select them and click on the add button in the middle to move them across let's select something else like edit background and click on at if you want to show absolutely every command that's available in visio again just select all commands and all of these commands are listed in alphabetical order so if you're looking for something specific that makes it a lot easier so i'm going to add some alignment tools i'm going to select align center align left and also a line middle and when i click on ok you'll see that they've all now been added to my quick access toolbar so this is something i would advise that you do and it might be something worth doing after you've been using vizio for a while so that you have a greater understanding of the things that you use most frequently now the final thing i'm going to show you here is just how you can add a little bit of separation to the commands on the quick access toolbar because currently we really just have a long list of all the commands they're all jumbled together and not really very well organized so we can split these up using separators so once again i'm going to click the drop down and go into more commands because what you'll see at the top here is something called separator so i'm going to add three separators just by clicking the add button three times and i'm going to organize my commands so they're a little bit more logical so the first thing i'm going to do here is this touch mouse mode i don't tend to use that very often so i'm going to remove that from the quick access toolbar by clicking the remove button in the middle now spelling is something i tend to do last after my diagram is complete so i'm going to use my arrow keys to move that all the way down to the bottom now what i'm going to do is i'm going to take this first separator and i'm going to move it up and place it just after repeat fill color i'm going to take my second separator i'm going to move it up and i'm going to place it after these formatting commands i'm going to take my third separator i'm going to move it up to separate these two commands from my alignment tools and i'm actually going to add one more separator and i'm going to move that down so that i have spelling separated as well so now when i click on ok take a look at my quick access toolbar it's added in these separation lines just to give my commands a little bit more structure and it allows me to group together commands of similar type and of course if at any time you decide that you want to remove a command from the quick access toolbar it's a simple case of right clicking and you get a remove from quick access toolbar option so i'm going to remove both of these and you can also remove separators again just right click and select remove it's as simple as that that's it for this lesson i will see you in the next one when working in vizio it's really important that you understand the different types of menu that are available so far in this course we've predominantly been looking at commands that are on the ribbon but there are also other ways for you to perform actions in your diagram and that is by using contextual ribbons and contextual menus now what are contextual menus and ribbons and how do we access them well it's fairly straightforward if we click on one of the shapes so i'm going to click on this text box if you right click your mouse on your selection it's going to pop open a menu to the right hand side and i'm talking about this menu running down here now the reason why these are called contextual menus is because they are directly related to whatever it is that you're clicked on so these contextual menus will change depending on what item you have selected so currently i have a text box selected so i'm getting all of the options related to a text box so i can cut copy and paste this text box i can group it with other objects i can add containers i can add hyperlinks and comments i can edit the text i can work with shape data or i can format the shape now what you'll notice is that if i click away and click on this shape just here and right click i get a very similar menu because these two are essentially both shapes however if i click on this item just here and right click i get an entirely different contextual menu because this is a different type of shape this is directly related to an organization chart and so i get the relevant menu options so just be aware that that right click menu changes depending on the item that you currently have selected what you'll also notice is that if i was to right click just somewhere on this blank canvas i also get a contextual menu directly related to the canvas as opposed to a specific object or item on the page now what you may also have noticed is that when i right click not only do i get a contextual menu i get this little panel of icons just above and this is what we call the mini toolbar now again this is something that you can choose to turn off if you find it particularly annoying or not particularly helpful but the idea of this mini toolbar is to give you quick access to some of the most common commands so for example formatting tools i can increase the font size change the text to bold italic i've got my format painter i can change the shape and all this is here for really is that again you don't have to waste time hunting through the different ribbons to try and access these commands quickly now some people absolutely love this mini toolbar others do not so let me show you how you can disable this mini toolbar if you find it just gets in the way and you're not particularly using it now as you can imagine with anything like this customizations this is where we jump into our vizio options so up to file to move us into the backstage area and all the way down the bottom we have options i'm going to click on the general page because the first option that we have underneath the user interface options is show mini toolbar on selection so i'm going to deselect this option and click on ok now aside from contextual menus we also have something called contextual ribbons and these are ribbons that appear or disappear depending on what you've currently got selected so let me show you a quick example of this i'm going to go across to the insert ribbon and i'm going to insert a container and i'm just going to choose this container just here and let's move that over very slightly now because i have this container selected if you take a look up at my ribbons you can see that i now have a contextual ribbon called container tools with a format sub ribbon now this is only showing because i'm currently clicked on the container and i now have all of the different commands related to this specific object so i have container styles that i can apply heading styles i can lock the container everything is related to this object type if i was to deselect so click away you'll see that that ribbon disappears and if i click on something else because it's not a container i'm not getting that contextual ribbon i don't get it back until i click back on the container so again just bear that in mind depending on what you've inserted what you're clicked on you may see ribbons appear that are specifically related to that object and that is what we call contextual ribbons now the final thing i want to show you in this lesson is just how you can customize the status bar now the status bar is the bar that runs all the way across the bottom of the interface so you can see if we work from the left mine currently says page one of one it says english united states which is the language that i'm typing in and it also contains on the right hand side my zoom slider as well as a couple of other things now you can control what appears on this status bar by customizing it and again this involves a right-click menu so if we hover our mouse over the status bar and right click we get our customize status bar menu and everything that i have ticked is going to display on my status bar now you can see that i have quite a few different things ticked there but i don't have a great deal of information on my status bar currently and that's because i'm not currently clicked on or using something that requires that information to appear but it is showing me the page number it's also showing me the language and it's showing me things like my zoom slider and you'll notice if i deselect this then the zoom slider disappears from the bottom right hand corner click it again and it appears so again this is something that is definitely worth customizing because this information that appears in the status bar can be really useful when you're working with different objects in visio so in general i tend to have pretty much everything turned on in here that is it for this lesson i will see you in the next one it's important to know where you can go to obtain help when you're working in vizio unfortunately for us physio has a very comprehensive help system so let's take a look at all the different utilities that we have available now the first and most obvious thing is we can obtain help through something called screen tips now screen tips are particularly helpful if you want to know what a particular command on the ribbon does so for example if i hover my mouse over let's say the copy command you'll see that i get what we call a screen tip pop-up and this is going to tell you the title of the command it's going to show you the keyboard shortcut in brackets if it has one and then it's going to give you a short description of what that command actually does so for copy it says it puts a copy of the selection on the clipboard so you can paste it somewhere else if i hover over something like the connector again you can see that this has a keyboard shortcut of control plus three and it says it allows you to draw connectors between different objects so these screen tips are super useful if i just want to get a high level understanding of what that command is going to do when i click on it now as with everything in visio if you don't particularly like these screen tips or you want to customize them then you can do that as well through visio options so let's take a quick look at that i'm going to jump across to file to go into that backstage area and we're going to go to options we want to be on the general page and in this first group right at the bottom you see you have screen tips style and i get a few different ways that i can customize these screen tips so if i don't particularly like them and i want to turn them off i could select don't show screen tips i can choose to not show the description in my screen tip so maybe i just want the keyboard shortcut and the actual name of the command without the description i could choose this option or if i want the whole lot absolutely everything which is in general what i have it set to because i find it the most useful i can select this first option show feature descriptions in screen tips so that is where you can go if you want to customize them slightly now aside from screen tips you also have the tell me feature and the tell me feature isn't particularly obvious but it's actually where we have the word search at the top here and you'll see as i hover over it i get a screen tip that says tell me it's got a keyboard shortcut of alt plus q and it says just start typing here to bring features to your fingertips and get help so if i don't know how to do something i can just simply start to type it in here it's going to show me where that's located on the ribbons and it's also going to give me the option of accessing more help on this particular command so maybe i want to know how to insert a text box i can simply type that in and then underneath the actions heading it's showing me text box with a pop-out menu if i click the pop-out menu it's going to take me directly to that particular command so if i click draw horizontal text box my mouse then changes to that tiny cross hair and i can then draw another text box so this saves me from having to find where that's located on the ribbon so super useful let's just type that in again so insert a text box because the other options that i have aside from actions is i can choose to get some help on inserting text boxes and you can see here it says that there are 10 results so if i just want to read up a little bit about text boxes how you insert them i can click on this link it's going to open up the help pane on the right hand side and it's going to link me through to online help and all of these different titles are related to text boxes so it really depends what i'm trying to do what i'm interested in reading about so for example if i was to select this first option just here it's going to jump me to the microsoft help page essentially and it's going to walk me through the process of inserting a text field into a shape if i want to go back to my search results if i click the back arrow it's going to take me back to my results and i can choose to click on a separate link you'll also notice in here that you will occasionally have videos as well so if i click on this it's going to show me a video which will step me through the process of how to add text to shapes diagrams or connectors when i'm done with this help pane if i just click the cross in the top right hand corner that's going to close it down and if at any point i want to bring that up again i don't necessarily have to go up to the tell me box i can just press the f1 key on my keyboard to open up help and i can run a search from here now the final way that you can access help files is by using the help ribbon and you'll see that i have my help ribbon turned on up here but if you don't see the help ribbon then this might be a ribbon that you need to turn on through your visio options so let's just take a moment to take a look at how we do that again we're going to file down to options now for this when we want to turn ribbons off or on to show or hide them we need to select the customize ribbon page and on the right hand side you're going to see all of the ribbons and you'll see that currently the majority of these have a tick next to them which means that they're going to display so you might find that if you can't see the help ribbon you'll probably find that you just don't have a tick in this particular box so make sure this is ticked click on ok and then you should see this help ribbon at the top now we just have four different icons on here the first one is help and this will jump you into the same screen that we were just in so it's going to open up that pane on the right hand side it's pretty much exactly the same as pressing the f1 shortcut key the next option you have is to contact support so let's test this out how do i insert a text box [Music] let's click on get help and of course the first thing it provides us with are some self-help solutions so links to the help pages now you'll notice at the bottom here underneath get more help it says how can i talk to an agent now currently it says that there are no support options available now this might be different depending on your location if you're in the us you might be able to call somebody at microsoft to get help with your query but for me i don't have any other support options other than the help files or i can jump into the community forums and i will say that community forums are a fantastic resource because there's always somebody who knows the answer to your question so it's always worth signing up to community forums just in case you have something that you can't find within the help files so that is your second option we then have a feedback button so if you want to send feedback to microsoft either about something that you like or you don't like or even if you have a suggestion for future releases then you can definitely do that as well and then finally you can access the training files and this is a gallery of different videos related to visio training so if you want to learn how to create diagrams i could select this and then i get a whole bunch of videos which walks me through the process so again a super helpful little feature if you're struggling to know how to do something so hopefully you agree with me the help is pretty comprehensive within vizio and of course if all else fails we can always jump onto the internet ask a question and we're probably gonna find a link to our answer so those are the options that you have with regards to accessing help from within the vizio application that's it for this lesson i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to the course it's time for us now to take a look at ways that we can improve our efficiency by utilizing keyboard shortcuts and again keyboard shortcuts might be something that you're familiar with because you've used them in other applications i will say that with microsoft applications keyboard shortcuts tend to be the same across all of the different apps so keyboard shortcuts that you use in excel or word many of them apply to visio as well and if you're not really sure what i mean by that terminology it's really just a way of executing an action or executing a command using the keyboard as opposed to clicking with your mouse on the command on the ribbon and a lot of people find keyboard shortcuts a lot more efficient and a lot quicker to work with now i will say there are hundreds of keyboard shortcuts available in vizio and you are never going to remember all of them so i generally tend to advise people to find five to ten that are particularly useful so how do we go about finding out which keyboard shortcuts are assigned to which commands well there's a couple of ways that we can do this the first way we've already actually seen if you remember in the last lesson when we were hovering over these commands if i hover over copy again you'll see in the screen tip if there is a keyboard shortcut assigned to that particular command it's going to show in brackets so i can see that the copy keyboard shortcut is control plus c now when you're executing keyboard shortcuts you don't have to hold down control and c at the same time you press control and then you press c so if i hover my mouse over bold you can see that the keyboard shortcut is control plus b now some keyboard shortcuts require a few more key presses for example if i hover over the increase font size you can see the keyboard shortcut there is shift control period and again you don't hold all of these down at the same time you hold down control keep control down when you press shift and keep both of them down when you press period now one thing you will notice is that not every single command has a keyboard shortcut assigned to it so for example if i hover over the font color you can see that i don't have a keyboard shortcut in brackets for this so again just be aware of that don't expect everything to have a shortcut key assigned to it i will say that most things do have a shortcut key so connectors here control plus three pointer tool control plus one so on and so forth so that's a real quick way of being able to see if a command has a keyboard shortcut now if you want to see or print out a full list of all the keyboard shortcuts available in visio so you can go through and maybe pick 5 to 10 that are going to be useful to you you can use the tell me feature or the search box to find keyboard shortcuts in the help file and it's going to list them all out there for you now as we're talking about keyboard shortcuts i'm going to access the tell me box using a shortcut key and the shortcut key is alt q and you can see that that activates that tell me box so now i'm going to type in keyboard shortcuts and right at the bottom it says get help on keyboard shortcuts there are 10 results so let's select this it's going to open up that help pane on the right hand side and the first link i have here are keyboard shortcuts for vizio now when i click on this link it gives me a little bit information about what keyboard shortcuts are and then i have a whole bunch of different links so the keyboard shortcuts are divided down into different categories depending on what you're trying to do so so if i click on this frequently used shortcuts link it's going to show me all of the different shortcut keys to perform various different tasks now if you find this help screen a bit small you can pop this out so if i hover over just above where it says keyboard shortcuts you can see my cursor changes i can click to pick this window up and drag it out and then i can make this a little bit bigger if i want to to make it a bit easier to read so i can see here that if i want to go to full screen view i can press the f5 key if i want to open the home tab in the ribbon i can press alt h if i want to pull up the format shape task pane f3 so on and so forth so this is definitely worth having a look through and maybe memorizing a few that you think are going to be useful to you now another way of using shortcuts within visio is to press the alt key on your keyboard now you'll notice that as soon as i do that we get various different letters and numbers assigned to the different tabs and also to the quick access toolbar commands and i can basically use these letters and numbers to navigate using my keyboard so i'm essentially using keyboard shortcuts instead of my mouse to move through the different ribbons and commands and i will say this is particularly useful from an efficiency perspective for people who like to keep their hands on the keyboard when they're working and also for people who maybe have some issues when it comes to working with a mouse like a wrist injury or something like that so for example if i want to jump across to the view tab i can see that the letter w is assigned to that tab if i press w on my keyboard i'm now on the view tab and it's now assigned a letter to each of the commands so if i want to access zoom for example i can press q it's then going to pull up the different options i have when it comes to magnification now i'm going to cancel out of this little window and again i don't have to use my mouse to do this i can press my tab key you can see it moves across to ok press it again it moves across to cancel and then i can hit the enter key so i've basically done all of that without having to pick up my mouse so maybe i now want to insert something so i can press n to jump me to that insert tab perhaps i want to insert an online picture so i'm going to press f and it's going to jump me to the online pictures gallery i can perform my search let's just say an apple i can use my arrow keys to move through my different options and when i find one i like i can hit enter once it's selected i can see that insert is highlighted at the bottom so i can press enter again to insert that picture of an apple so i managed to do that entire process without actually having to reach for my mouse at all now i'm going to undo this because i don't want a giant apple in the middle of my vizio diagram now another really important keyboard shortcut is the undo keyboard shortcuts now remember we do have the undo command on our quick access toolbar it's the second one just here but the keyboard shortcut for undo is control z so this will control zed the last action that you did it will undo the last action so for me that was inserting that picture and you can see that it's now gone so lots of different ways that you can work with keyboard shortcuts that's all from me for now i will see you in the next lesson so far in this course we've been dipping in and out of those vizio options and i really just want to close out this particular section just by highlighting to you a few other options that you might want to review or change so let's jump back up to that file tab to take us into the backstage area go down to options and click on the general page now as we saw previously we can control if we want that mini toolbar to show when we select text and this is personal preference if you don't like it make sure that you don't have a tick in this box underneath that we have live preview enabled and you'll remember live preview when we were changing the fill color of our shapes live preview enables you to see what the shape is going to look like if you were to select a particular color from the palette now i find this really useful but again if you don't like that option or you don't have any use for it then you can definitely turn it off and of course we also saw how we can customize as screen tips and then underneath there we have a section called personalize your copy of microsoft office and you can see it's got my username and also my initials now these are editable fields so you could technically change these to whatever you wanted to so you could change this to something crazy like minnie mouse if you so desired just be aware that certain actions within vizio will use this information for example if you were to add comments into your visio diagram which we're going to get onto a bit later in this course it's going to tag those comments with your name and it's going to pick up your username from this area of options so unless you want your comments saying minnie mouse it's probably best to keep this on your name and i can also change my office background which i currently have set to clouds and if you're wondering what that is if you take a look right at the top where we have this blue area i have a very slight pattern in the background here that is the clouds pattern that is what this little section controls so if i change this to doodle circles you'll see in a moment when i click on ok that background pattern is going to change i can also change my office theme from colorful to something like dark grey and of course finally at the bottom we can choose if we want that start screen to show when the application starts and if you recall we actually deselected that so let's just click on ok for a moment and see these changes take effect so click on ok you'll see i now have doodle circles at the top here and my entire interface has changed to a dark gray color so once again this is entirely personal preference now i don't particularly like those doodle circles let's change it back to clouds and i'm going to change mine back to colorful so let's move to the next page which is the proofing page and this is where you can control things like your autocorrect options and also how vizio deals with spelling and grammar errors so you can jump in here and you can basically set up your spell checker you can decide what you want it to ignore and what you want it to include but one option i would recommend that you turn on is this one at the bottom check spelling as you type so when you start typing text directly into your diagram vizio is going to highlight immediately if you've made a spelling or grammar error now i like to have this option turned on because i like to deal with spelling errors as soon as they occur so let me show you what i mean i'm going to click on ok and i have some text here but let's just delete that out and i'm going to make an intentional spelling error so let's say text box and you can see immediately i have a red squiggly line under the word text so vizio has picked up that this isn't spelt correctly i can right click and it's going to give me some suggestions i can also choose to ignore the spelling error or if it's an unusual word i might want to add it to my dictionary so things like people's names organization names which are valid words they're not spelt incorrectly they just might not be recognized by the vizio dictionary so for things like that i would always add those into my dictionary however in this case i can see that i did mean to spell the word text i can select it from the menu to correct it immediately so check spelling as you type is a good option to have turned on let's jump across to the save page there's only really a couple of things i want to point out to you in here and that is underneath this save documents heading i want to ensure that my files are being saved in the visio document format which is the vs dx file extension and that is pretty much what you'll save all of your visio diagrams as unless they contain macros and if you're not sure what a macro is i'll talk a little bit more about that later but a macro is basically a way of automating tasks and processes in visio and if you do have a macro within your document you need to save it as a vizio macro enabled document the other option you have in here is to save this as an older version of vizio so maybe if you intend to send this to somebody who has a much older version of vizio than you do so 2003 to 2010 you could choose to save it in an older version to ensure that they're not going to have any issues when they open it and try to work in the document but in general you want to have this set to visio document the other option that's important in here is this second option down because this controls how often vizio saves your documents so if something goes wrong with your visio document say it gets stuck and you have to close vizio down it's going to auto recover information every 10 minutes so so you want to make sure that you have this set to a reasonably low number so that if the worst does happen you're not losing a lot of work let's jump across to our language settings so this is where you can set up your display language and also your authoring and proofing languages so you can see here that i have mine set to english that is my display language and then underneath i have two languages that i use when i'm creating and editing documents including things like spell checking and grammar checking and you'll see here that even though i'm in the uk i have united states english set as my preferred authoring language now the reason why i have that set is because most of the work that i do is for us clients so i want to make sure that i'm spelling things in the correct way because even though we both speak english we do have slight differences when it comes to how we spell certain words and a good example of that would be a word like color in the uk we throw in an extra u into that word so i want to make sure that when i'm spell checking i'm spell checking in english united states now if you want to add more languages you definitely can do that so i can just select add a language i can choose another language from the list so let's go for french click on add it's going to add that in and if i wanted to i could set this as my preferred language now unfortunately i can't speak french so i'm not going to set that as my preferred language i'm actually just going to remove that from my list but what i would do in here is if i was working for a uk-based client i would probably come into here and set english united kingdom as my preferred language so double check to make sure you have all of the correct settings in here now if we click on the ease of access page this is a really quick way of making vizio more accessible and you'll see it's kind of cherry picked a few items from these other pages that you might want to quickly change so for example we can change our screen tip style which we've seen how to do previously i can choose if i want the shortcut keys shown in the screen tips which i do i can also come here to enable the start screen when this application starts so pretty much the important things from this page we've already seen how to access let's jump across to the advanced page and in advance you normally find a whole heap of different options so i'm definitely not going to go through all of them i will say that most of the time the default settings are pretty much fine for most people however one thing i will highlight if we scroll down is the maximum number of undo's so we saw previously how we can press the control zed keyboard shortcut to undo our last action now i could press that 20 times to undo the last 20 actions and of course i can modify this so if i want to take this up to 30 i can definitely do that or i can reduce it down to 10 15. so if you're somebody who makes a lot of mistakes and likes to backtrack then i would definitely review this and maybe set that to 30 or 40. as we scroll down a bit more we again we've already seen this is where we can come to change the number of recent documents that we see in that backstage area and we can also change our default units down here as well and again i would say this is probably something you're going to want to modify after you've been working with the defaults for a while if you're not getting on with them then you can decide to change these default units to something completely different but for the time being i'm going to keep these as the default let's jump across to the customize ribbon page this is where we can come if we want to add additional commands onto our ribbons so you can see the ribbons listed on the right hand side i can expand them out and i can see the different groups and then i can see the commands that are within these groups if i want to add additional commands i can definitely do that i can select and click add to add to any of my ribbons now i will say that if you're using visio at an organization then sometimes this option is disabled a lot of organizations lock down their ribbons and they don't let you customize them because they want to be very strict with what you see on your ribbon so if you come into here and you find that the add button is greyed out then you probably have some kind of company policy that stops you from customizing your ribbons what you can also do in here is create your own ribbons with your own commands on them and i'm going to show you how to do this towards the end of this course the next page down is the quick access toolbar we've already been in here we've seen how this works so let's jump straight to the next page which is the add-ins page so add-ins in general allow you to expand on the current capabilities of visio so this area will display any microsoft add-ins and it will let you view and manage them from here you can see that i don't have any listed so there's nothing too much to see in this section at the moment and then finally we have our trust center settings and again this is something i'm going to go into in more detail towards the end of the course but just to give you a high level overview as to what this actually is it basically allows you to determine how certain file types are open so it's a way of keeping your documents your diagrams and your computer safe secure and healthy trust center allows you to determine how things like files that contain macros are handled it also allows you to set things like trusted locations so if you were to open a vizio diagram from an external system if it's not listed as a trusted location then you're going to get some notifications some warning messages so the whole idea of this is to help keep your computer safe and virus free now as i said i'm not going to go into this in too much detail at the moment but just be aware that that's what it does so those are your visio options i've given you a very high level overview there and just tried to cherry pick some of the more important ones as i said the majority of these settings the defaults are going to be fine for you but we will at various different points in this course be dipping in and out of those options when they're relevant to what we're doing but for the time being that is it we're done with this lesson and we are done with this first introductory section in the next section we're really going to start to get going and we're going to create our first drawing so i'm going to grab a coffee and then i will see you over there hello everyone and welcome back to this course on vizio 2019 in this lesson we're going to create our first drawing and what we're going to create is an office layout now this is a reasonably straightforward drawing but it's going to allow you to see all of the basics and also get an introduction to visio terminology and some words and phrases that i use i'll explain as we go through now the first thing we're going to do is select a template so let's jump up to the file tab which is going to take us into that backstage area and we're creating a new drawing and this is going to open up all of those visio templates so i'm just going to scroll down just to take a look at my templates and we're looking for the office layout and you can see that there is the last one in the second row so let's click to open up this template we get this dialog box which tells us the name of the template who it's provided by in this case microsoft we have a small description of the template the download size and then the units that we want to load this template in now all of the settings on my pc are in us units i'm going to stick with us but if you would prefer to use metric units then you can select the other option the other thing i will say is that i'm going to be using us units throughout this course so it might be a bit easier for you to follow along if you use the same units that i'm using let's click on create so the template has now downloaded and opened in the visio window and you can see that initially it is blank it has no shapes in it now before we start to build our office layout and add some shapes in let's save our template so back up to file to take us into that backstage area and straight down to save as now remember if you've saved into the folder recently then you're going to see it here on the right hand side and if you recall i pinned the course files folder to the top of the list so i just need to click once to select and then i can save my drawing and i'm going to call this officelayout01 and click save so now we're all saved and ready to go now the first thing i want to highlight to you in this interface window is that your drawing can have many pages and if you take a look right at the bottom you can see here it's telling me that i'm currently on page one and if i click the up arrow it's going to show me all of the pages contained within this drawing now currently i only have one but you could add many different pages for many different drawings so maybe throughout the process of designing an office layout you have one page which shows the layout of the reception area maybe you want to add another page which shows the layout of the main office floor maybe another page that shows the layout of the kitchen or the meeting rooms so on and so forth and sometimes it's quite nice to be able to keep all of those layouts together under one drawing as opposed to creating separate drawings for each and if you want to add a page it's a simple case of clicking the plus symbol and you can see now it's added page two i can go through and add as many pages as i like and if i click the up arrow i can toggle between those different pages very easily now i only need one page at the moment so i'm going to delete the two pages that i've just added and deleting pages is a simple case of right clicking on the page and just selecting delete from the contextual menu so let's now move our attention to this panel that we have on the left hand side the shapes window now when you select a template you're going to get content in this shapes window and this is going to be content that's related to whichever template you've selected so because i've selected the office layout template i'm now getting categories like walls doors and windows office furniture office equipment so on and so forth with all of the different shapes that appear underneath those categories now this shapes window can be collapsed so again just right at the top i can minimize the shapes window which is going to give me a little bit more room for my layout now when you collapse up your shapes window it doesn't disappear entirely instead it minimizes the shape so you just see the icons and if you hover over the icon you're going to get a little screen tip pop up to tell you what shape that is now these different categories that we have here so where it says office equipment office furniture walls doors and windows these are what we call stencils and that is very important vizio terminology and each stencil contains a number of masters so underneath the walls doors and windows stencil i have the room master i have the window master the tea room master so on and so forth and i can use each of these masters to build my drawing so the first thing i'm going to do here is i'm going to grab this room master and i'm going to drag and drop it onto my drawing so let's click drag i'm going to place it in the middle and drop now once you place a master onto a drawing the terminology changes slightly it's now called a shape and dragging dropping is the basic way to add shapes to your drawings now because i've used the room master this is the overall size of the room that i'm trying to plan and you can see that i have the dimensions currently on either side and of course because i have this set to us dimensions that's what i'm seeing just here i'm going to come back to dimensions a little bit later on so now that we have our basic room layout let's add something else i'm going to grab the window master from the stencil and i'm going to drag this onto my drawing and look what happens if i pull this near a wall you can see that vizio recognizes that in general windows tend to go on walls it's giving me that little green square which says glue to geometry and this is one of those key skills in vizio gluing one thing to another so if i now let go physio does its best guess to position that window on the wall everything's all nicely lined up i haven't had to do too much fiddling around to get that to look neat and of course you can move these things around and adjust the size of the overall room and we're going to take a look at that a little bit later but for the time being let's add something else i'm going to drag the door master from the stencil and i'm going to do exactly the same thing i'm going to drag that over here and i'm going to say i want this door just about there glue to geometry and once again it's done our best guess and positioned this shape now if you decide you want to delete any of these shapes it's a simple case of clicking on the shape and then just pressing the delete key on your keyboard now i actually do want that door so let's re-drag that back and glue to geometry so so far both of these shapes that we've added to our drawing have come from the walls doors and windows stencil so let's select something different i'm going to select the office furniture stencil and this loads up a whole bunch of different masters that i can drag onto my drawing so for example let's grab one of these i'm going to go for the boat shaped table i'm going to drag and i'm going to drop that onto my drawing as you can see this table is rather large so i'm going to resize that now there are a few different ways that you can resize shapes and i'm going to show you how you can be super precise a little bit later on but for the time being if you just want to do a simple resize you can see whilst i have this shape selected around the outside i have these circles or these resize handles and all i need to do is just drag it in to make that a little bit smaller and i can then reposition that table in the room in fact i might want to make that a little bit smaller again and click away to deselect you can also rotate any of these shapes so you'll see just above i have this little rotation handle and if i click and drag it's going to allow me to rotate that table around and i can rotate it the full 360 degrees to get it positioned exactly as i like it now one thing you also might have noticed as i was resizing and moving this shape is that some guidelines pop up on the screen to help me position this object so these are super useful when it comes to positioning objects on your drawing and you can see where i currently have my object both of those green lines intersect which means it's dead in the center of this drawing and we're going to speak a lot more about aligning and all the different alignment tools that you have because it's such an important thing for you to grasp when you're working in vizio now what if at this stage i decide that i don't want a boat shaped table anymore i want a different type of table well i could of course go back across to my stencil and drag a different table in and delete out this one but a quicker way of doing this would be to select the boat shape table jump up to the home tab and in the editing group on the end we have a change shape option and this is basically going to show me all the other different styles of table from the office furniture stencil so maybe i decide that instead of this table i want this one here which is i think the racetrack table so let's click the shape has now changed i haven't had to go in and delete it and then drag something else it's a little bit quicker just to change the shape so the main points to take away here is that templates contain stencils and those stencils are related to whichever template you've selected each stencil contains masters which you can drag and drop onto the drawing once you drop them onto the drawing they become shapes and you can move those shapes around align them and position them wherever you want to on the drawing i think that's more than enough for now that's the end of this lesson i will see you in the next one for the next section you'll want to download the course exercise files click the link below in the video description to get these you can also scroll through the details to find timestamps for each section in this course if you're enjoying this training please leave us a comment hello everyone and welcome to exercise one of this course now as with any of the exercises in this course you'll find my solution in the exercises folder now what exercise one shows us is an l-shaped office with a couple of windows and in that office we have some furniture so we've got a couple of chairs a few desks and also things like pot plants lamps waste bins so on and so forth so what i basically want you to do is recreate this office layout now i don't want you to worry too much about getting it exactly the same size or the same layout i just really want you to get used to adding shapes moving them around rotating them resizing them and of course deleting them the other thing you may want to experiment with when doing this is opening the doors to the left or to the right and just as a little bit of a hint the contextual menus are really going to help you when it comes to dealing with doors so give this a go as i said if you want to check my answer is in the exercise files folder that's it for now i will see you in the next lesson now as we saw previously when we created our office layout and we selected a template when you do choose a template you basically get an empty diagram you just get the correct stencils loaded into the shapes window but basically you are starting from scratch however in 2019 a new range of starter diagrams have been introduced and these really just give you a much fuller base from which to start from so let's take a look at some of the starter diagrams that we have to choose from so back up to file and down into new to pull up our templates so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to scroll down to my templates i'm going to select this one the basic flowchart and what it presents me with is a selection of different basic flowcharts so i've got four different templates that i could select here the first one is just a blank a basic blank flowchart i then have a vertical flow chart a decision branches flow chart and then finally an on-page reference flowchart and you can see as i click on each one of these the description changes at the side so you can get a better idea as to how this template works now each of these is called a starter diagram so what i'm going to do here is i'm just going to select this one here the decision branches flow chart and click on create and instead of getting just a blank template with my shapes window and different stencils what i get is a start diagram with shapes already on it and i also get a little tips pane offering me a little bit of help with this drawing so you can see here in this first tip if i scroll in very slightly to make that a bit easier for you to see it talks first about the theme so it says color can add clarity and elegance pick a theme from the design tab so it's giving you a bit of a tip as to how to change the overall color scheme of your drawing it then says drag and drop to put a shape between two connected shapes drag it onto the connector between them and if you want to move a sub process to a different path on the process tab use create from selection so this little tips pane can be super useful particularly if you are reasonably new to vizio 2019 and you need a little bit of guidance so fundamentally already this template is different to the one that we created previously because we already have shapes on it we don't need to start from scratch and we're also getting a little bit of help now it is worth noting that not all of the templates have starter diagrams just to show you another example of a template that we're going to be using in this course let's jump back up to file and go down to new and this time i'm going to select basic network diagram let's choose this last template and click on create and again you can see that this one already contains different shapes and we also have those useful tips at the bottom now another thing that's worth noting is that not all of these starter diagrams are available in all editions of vizio so some are very specific to vizio professional so let's jump back to file again and go down to new and if i scroll down i'm going to select this one here bpm diagram and you can see that for this one i have a few different starter diagrams available now this is one of those diagrams that isn't available in visio standard it's only available in visio professional so just be aware of that if you are using vizio standard now the final thing i want to mention here is that once you're done with these tips you can just delete them out so these are probably not something you're going to want to keep on your final drawing and if i click on these tips i get the selection border around the outside and i can simply press the delete key to delete those tips out that's it for this lesson i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to the course in this lesson we're going to look at the vizio workspace in a little bit more detail and we're going to start by taking a look at the shapes window and the features associated with it now hopefully you were successful with exercise one because that's what i have loaded up into my window right now now one thing you might have noticed when you were working through exercise one is you might have had some trouble lining things up and also positioning shapes and this is one of those topics that's best to cover reasonably early on in the course because it's something that's so fundamental to working in vizio and that's why we're going to start by looking at some of the important features of the workspace now as you use vizio more and more if you are going to use it to draw large complex diagrams then you're going to need as much space as possible on the page and as we've already seen one way of doing that is to minimize the shapes window now you might think that when you do that you are reasonably limited with how much you can use that shapes window but remember by minimizing you're not completely getting rid of the shapes window you still have access to all of the masters within your stencil and if you need to scroll through these you'll see right at the bottom you have a down arrow and as soon as you hover over it it scrolls through the rest of the masters from within that stencil and the same thing applies to the arrow at the top now just above there if you wanted to access other stencils you can see that you have this little icon just here with an arrow pointing to the right and if i click on that it's going to allow me to access different stencils and load up those masters so currently you can see that i'm clicked on the office accessories stencil so the point i'm trying to make here is that you don't have to maximize the shapes window in order to access all of your commands now i mentioned earlier that a template will include one or more stencils so you might think that when you open a specific template so in this case the office layout you're only going to see the stencils related to the office layout template but that's not technically how it works when you select a template it does load up the stencils that are related to that template but in fact all of the standard stencils are available in every template they just aren't always visible so technically if i wanted to draw an office layout i could select any template in visio and still manage to draw the office layout i would just need to enable the stencils that i need now with this particular template which is the office layout template you can see in this menu i have enabled all of the stencils that are related to this template but if i wanted to load up some completely different stencils all i would need to do is go to more shapes and let's say let's go down to maps and floor plans maybe i want to go across to building plan and this is going to show me all of the stencils related to the building plan now you can see for this particular plan four of them have a tick next to them so it means that those four stencils are enabled for this particular layout but if i wanted to load up a completely different stencil all i would need to do is scroll through the list and let's just say i want to load up plumbing i just need to select to enable that stencil and that then makes that stencil available and when i click you can now see it's been added to the bottom so you can pretty much customize in any template which stencils you see which in turn gives you access to all of the masters on that stencil now if i decide that i've now finished using this plumbing stencil and i no longer need it you can also close individual stencils when you're done using them now for this you do need to maximize the shapes window by clicking on the arrow i'm going to scroll down and find my plumbing stencil right click and you can see i've got a close button just there and that's just going to close that stencil down and remove it from the list now some features in visio can be particularly useful for saving time and one of those is the use of quick shapes and each stencil has its own set of quick shapes so if we take a look at the walls doors and window stencil if we look at the masters underneath you can see a very faint gray line now everything above this line is considered to be a quick shape so more often than not they're the shapes that you use most often and then we have all of our masters underneath and your quick shapes are always going to be at the top of your list so let's go across to a different stencil i'm going to open up office accessories again you can see that gray line that separates my quick shapes which is these four from the rest of my shapes and it's very simple to add any shape or any master to your quick shapes list so if we scroll down maybe i decide that i want to add the round waste can so all i need to do is right click and we have an option in the contextual menu that says add to quick shapes and it's as simple as that you can now see that that has moved above the gray line making it super easy for me to access and if you want to reorder these quick shapes then you can do that as well you simply click and you can drag and you can see i get a little line which is telling me where it's going to be positioned when i let go of my mouse so you can really organize these in the most appropriate order for you so you can adjust any of the quick shapes for any of the stencils in this way now what you can also do is create your own stencils now what you'll notice is if you click on the more shapes arrow you have a my shapes menu item at the top and within my shapes we have favorites so let's suppose that i have three or four shapes and i want them to be easily accessible and let's suppose i want to pick shapes from all different stencils so i'm going to go across to the office furniture stencil and maybe i want to add the desk chair to my favorites all i need to do is right click add to my shapes add to favorites i'm going to go across to an entirely different stencil let's jump to office equipment and i'm going to add notebook pc right click add to my shapes add to favorites and let's add one more i'm going to add the printer let's right-click add to my shapes and put that into favorites as well so what i've essentially done there if i click on more shapes go to my shapes and take a look at my favorites it now loads up my favorite stencil and it's showing the masters that i've added so i can keep all of the shapes that i've customized in one place and as you can probably see just above it says drop quick shapes here so maybe i want to add the desk chair to my quick shapes i can also drag and drop to this area to move that above the gray line now the final thing i'm going to talk about in this lesson is just the different ways that you can view your drawing so we've already seen how we can obtain more space to work on our drawing by minimizing that shapes window but the shapes window is still there if you wanted to get rid of it all together if you jump up to the view tab and in the show group you have a task panes drop down this is where you can control what you're seeing in your window so currently shapes is selected but if i was to deselect that it's going to remove that shapes window entirely now i tend to like to have that turned on so let's just open that up again another thing that i like to have turned on sometimes is this shape data option and if we hover over it says it's going to show the shape data window to see the data properties for the selected shape so let's turn this on and this is going to give you information related to the selection in your drawing now this window can be resized so i'm actually going to drag the corner of it out a little bit now i'm not really seeing anything because i haven't selected anything in my drawing but if i was to select this desk just here you'll see that it starts to populate now i don't have a great deal of information in here at the moment but it is telling me the exact dimensions the width and the length of the object that i'm currently clicked on if i click on something different that's going to change and update click on something different again to get those exact dimensions now i'm going to be covering shape data in a lot more detail later on but it's just to get an introduction before we move on to using it a lot more later in the course and of course if you want to close this down you have a cross button in the top corner and that's just going to get rid of that shape data pop out that's it for this lesson i will see you in the next one as you might have already seen in the course so far sometimes positioning objects in visio can be tricky and it might be that you want to do the positioning accurately but also quickly now this is where the dynamic grid can help now the first thing we're going to do here is we're going to create a new drawing so i'm going to press the shortcut key control n and this basically loads up a completely blank template i don't have any shapes on my drawing and i don't have any stencils loaded on the left hand side yet now the easiest way for me to demo this to you is really just to load up some simple shapes on the drawing so i can show you the dynamic grid so let's jump into more shapes and we're going to load up a stencil so if we go down to general i'm just going to load up some basic shapes and there we go so i now have this stencil and you can see that this particular stencil just contains regular shapes we have things like rectangles squares circles things like that now before we go any further i'm going to save this to the course files folder and i think you've seen how we do that more than enough time so i'm going to do that off camera and rejoin you in a couple of seconds so now everything is saved let's turn on the dynamic grid now to do this we jump up to the view tab and in the visual aids group we want to make sure that we have dynamic grid selected so if you don't have a tick in that box then pop one in there now and if we take a look at the screen tip it says dynamic grid guides assist in the sizing spacing and alignment of shapes in relation to one another so this is super useful when you're trying to position objects on a page now i'm going to zoom in a little bit using my zoom slider to make this a bit easier for you to see so the first thing i'm going to do is let's grab a basic shape i'm going to use a circle i'm going to drag and drop it onto my drawing and i'm going to reposition this somewhere into the middle just here i'm then going to grab a square and also drag and drop that onto the drawing now watch what happens when i drag this square towards the circle you'll see that i get these alignment guides so this is telling me that the leftmost side of the square is lined up with the left most side of the circle the middle is also aligned and the right hand side is also aligned so this makes it really easy for me to align two objects with a good degree of accuracy now this particular example works so well because the shapes are essentially the same size so let me drag the square back over here i'm going to make this circle a bit bigger by dragging out the resize handle so now the circle is a lot bigger than the square so now if i drag the square underneath the circle you'll see it shows me when it's aligned to the left hand side if i drag it across it's telling me it's in the middle if i drag across even further it's telling me it's a line to the right now the same is true if i was to drag this square to the side of the circle you can see that i still get those alignment guides so it's telling me it's aligned to the bottom to the middle and then to the top so i'm going to grab this circle i'm just going to move it down i'm going to place this square just above now on the home tab we have an arrange group and in the arrange group we have some things that can help us when it comes to positioning so i'm going to jump straight down to spacing options and you can see here the default spacing options that are set so the distance between shapes horizontally is 0.375 inches vertically it's exactly the same now what i'm going to do here is i'm going to change this to an inch so let's type in number one and click on apply so what you'll see now is that when i drag this square around if i drag it nearer the circle can you see as soon as i get to within an inch distance away from the circle i get that little double headed green arrow so that's telling me that when i let go the shape is set to that default position one inch away from the other shape and let go if i was to drag the circle you can see i get the same thing so when i drag it near the square as soon as that green double headed arrow comes up it's telling me that i am an inch away from the square and this can really help you when it comes to positioning multiple objects on a page let's drag another shape onto our drawing so this time i'm going to go for the octagon and we're going to drag that down if i drag this octagon up and start to move it towards the square you'll see that i now get two double headed arrows so that's telling me that when i let go the octagon is exactly the same distance away from the square the square is away from the circle so i know that all three of those shapes are positioned correctly so the dynamic grid is really useful when it comes to positioning things on your page another thing the dynamic grid can be useful for is resizing so what i want to do here is i want to make the octagon the same size as the circle so if i grab this resize handle and start to drag out you can see that as soon as i get to the same size as the circle i get those double headed arrows display around the circle so if i was to let go i know this octagon is exactly the same size and i can now do exactly the same with the square so if i start to drag this out and make it bigger as soon as it's the same size i'm going to see those green handles there we go let go and i now know that all three of my shapes are exactly the same size i can then use my positioning guides to get those into the correct spot now this is just one example of the alignment tools that are available in visio there is a whole toolbox of these i'm going to explore more of them a bit later on in the course but for now turning on that dynamic grid is going to be really helpful to you so make sure you have a tick in that box so that you can position your objects with maximum efficiency that's it for this lesson i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to this course on visio 2019 in this lesson we're going to take a look at rulers grids and guidelines and in the previous lesson we've taken a look at the dynamic grid and how we can use that to help us when it comes to aligning shapes so we're now going to delve into the other tools that we have available in visio for aligning and positioning shapes on our drawing and we're going to start out by taking a look at rulers now if you take a look at the drawing that i have on the screen you can already see that i have rulers turned on so i have a ruler running horizontally across the top of the screen and also a ruler running vertically down the side and in the middle we have what we call the drawing window and really all the drawing window is is a rectangle that is bounded by the rulers the current drawing is on a white page and then behind the page we have this gray area that's not technically part of the drawing and we call this gray area the canvas now before we move on there is one setting that i want to point out to you so we're going to jump up to the design tab and in this first group the page setup group you can see that i have auto size turned on and i know it's turned on because it has that gray background so this is one of those toggle buttons so you can click it to turn it off and click again to toggle that back on so i'm just going to toggle this auto size option off so i can show you the difference so i'm going to select a shape from the basic shape stencil and let's just go for this octagon if i drag this and drop it onto the drawing canvas as opposed to on the drawing this object essentially isn't part of my drawing so if i was to print it's not going to print out because it's not been included on my page if i was to save this drawing this shape will be saved even though it's not technically part of the drawing it will be saved onto the canvas so i can come back in here and edit it now let's take a look at the difference if i just delete this shape out when we toggle auto size on let's do the same thing i'm going to take my octagon i'm going to drag it and drop it into the same place but look what happens this time visio increases the size of the drawing so you can effectively add shapes so that when you add them the paper resizes to accommodate those shapes so effectively now i have two pieces of paper and if i was to print this out it's going to print across two sheets now i'm just going to use my undo button just to undo that and i'm actually going to toggle auto size off again now let's move back to just talking about our rulers what you'll notice here is that the top left hand corner of the page is lined up with the zero point on the horizontal ruler and the bottom left hand corner of the page is lined up with the zero point on the vertical ruler now you can change this origin position and move it to a different point on the ruler i'm going to talk about this a little bit more later on now something else you can see on this ruler is scale marks and these marks although they do have a physical representation they don't necessarily correspond to a physical measurement on the screen so this drawing for example which was a blank drawing when i created it if i measure this using a physical ruler on my screen it's about 14 centimeters or 5 inches wide and the height is about 7 inches or 18 centimeters now this has nothing to do with the marks on the ruler if i was to take this drawing and look at it on another screen then it would be different so i'm using a reasonably large screen if i was to look at this drawing on a laptop or maybe look at it on a tablet device the physical size when i measure it with my ruler is going to be different because i'm viewing it on a bigger screen but the actual representation of the size of the page in visio is going to stay the same so those markers represent something but not physically how big it is now one of the things that's useful with the ruler is that you can use it for positioning and aligning objects so if i click on this square and just start to move it from left to right and i want you just to ignore those dynamic grid positional arrows i want you to take a look at the dotted line so you can see a green dotted line there which is basically telling me that this is lined up with a certain point on the ruler so i can drag this all the way across and you can see how that moves on the ruler with those small little dotted lines so if i want to make sure this is lined up on the left hand side with the number two on the ruler just look at those lines as i drag across and let go it's now perfectly lined up so you can use that ruler to position objects and help with alignment and the thing with those dots is that you can only actually see them when the shape is moving so when i let go of this shape those lines disappear and this also works the same for vertical positioning so if i was to again click on the square and move it up and down if you take a look at my ruler you can see those small dotted lines moving to show me where i have this object positioned now for some reason you decide that you don't want these rulers displayed then you can turn these off and on from the view tab in the show group i have a little ruler box just here which i currently have checked if i deselect that you'll see the rulers disappear but in general i find it helpful to have these turned on now another thing i'm going to turn on in this show group is the grid and just so we don't get confused i'm also going to turn off the dynamic grid temporarily from the visual aids group now again this grid can be used to help you align and position your shapes on the page and there is a setting where you can change the granularity of this grid so if you want to change the sizing of this grid then you can definitely change that from the show group if you click the little diagonal arrow in the corner that's going to open up the ruler and grid settings and you can see that currently i have my grid spacing set to fine for both horizontal and vertical so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to change this to normal for both and click on ok and you can see the sizing of my grid changes so now i can use this grid to align my objects on the page so again if i take this square i can drag it across and use the grid to align i could take my circle and i can drag that and i can use the grid to help me position and align that object as well now there are standard settings for this grid that have certain sizes for the squares of the grid but you can set a custom size so you can essentially tailor how big you want these squares on the grid to be so again if we jump into the show group and go down to grid i'm going to change the minimum spacing from 0 inches to 2 for both the horizontal and vertical and click on ok and you can see now how that changes my grid so if we now open up the drawing that we used in the first exercise the drawing of our office layout you can see some differences here with the drawing that we were just working on now because this is an office layout if you take a look at the ruler markings you can see that those are actually feet markers so in the top left hand corner we have zero feet because this is an office layout that uses feet measurements so i can see here currently the entire office plan is roughly 22 feet by 17 feet so i'm going to go back to my view tab i'm going to turn my grid on and i'm going to turn the dynamic grid off let's jump back into our dialog box where we can define our ruler and grid settings and i'm going to set the grid to be 5 feet and click on ok so now i'm viewing my office layout in a slightly different way i know that each one of these squares is five feet wide by five feet tall so the grid is based on the dimensions of the object that you're working on so now that we've explored the rulers and the grid let's talk more about snapping now snapping may or may not be a term that you're familiar with you do tend to encounter in other microsoft applications outside of visio but if you're not sure what it is let me show you what i mean if i grab this circle and just start to drag it you'll see that as soon as i drag it near a grid line it kind of snaps to that grid line and it is quite hard to see but you'll see it kind of pulls itself towards that grid line and snaps it into place and this is to help with the accurate alignment of your objects as soon as you go close to a grid line it pulls in towards it and snaps that object and by default snap to grid is enabled in visio if you did want to disable that so you can do more granular alignments if you jump up to the visual aids group and click the diagonal arrow in the bottom corner you can see here it says currently active and then i have snap selected so if i deselect snap and click on ok when i drag this object around now it doesn't snap at all to that grid and again this is probably quite hard for you to see but trust me it just kind of moves past that grid line i don't get that pulling sensation that's snapping to that particular grid line let's jump back into that visual aids dialog box now i'm going to turn snap back on and jump across to the advanced tab because this is where i can come to change the strength of my snapping and i can choose what i want to snap to so i can snap to rulers grids guides points so on and so forth and then i can use these sliders to say how strong or how weak i want that snapping to be now i haven't changed these from the defaults so i would suggest you jump into here and have a play around with these and set them so that they suit you and how you like to work now i'm going to jump back to the general tab and i'm going to turn the dynamic grid back on so you can see that i can also do that from this dialog box just here place a tick in the box and click on ok and i also want to double check in the show group that i have my guides turned on now i'm going to make this circle shape a little bit bigger i'm going to move it down and i'm going to move my square across to the middle now one thing you might notice is that the dynamic grid doesn't always work so if i select this octagon and start to move it around if i want to align this with the square at the top you can see that i can't because the circle is in the way so as i move i can align it with the circle but it's not showing me any guidelines for aligning with the square just above now one way around this is to use guides for alignment so i can add vertical or horizontal guides to my page so let's first add a vertical one i'm going to move my mouse all the way over to the side where the ruler is until i get that double headed arrow and you'll see that as i do that i get a little pop-up screen tip that tells me drag to add a vertical guide so if i click and drag across it's going to give me a vertical guide which i can then place anywhere now what i'm going to do with this is i'm going to align it at 2.5 and in my visual aids dialog box i'm going to make sure that i have the glue option selected and when i pick up my square and drag it towards that vertical guide can you see i get that little green square pop up and it says glue to guide so if i let go i can do exactly the same with the octagon if i pick that up and move it towards the guide as soon as i get close it's going to say glue i'm going to let go now before i try and align this circle what i'm going to do is i'm going to jump back into visual aids and i'm going to deselect glue and click on ok now i'm going to move the circle towards the guide and it snaps so that's fine i can let go but look what happens if i now try and move this vertical guide if i drag it over towards the left you can see that because i've glued those two objects to the guide those move when i move that guide whereas the circle which just snaps it's not glued stays in the same position so two of these are glued and one of them is snapped now i could also do the same thing by having a horizontal guide and it's worth noting that you can have as many of these guides on your page as you like and if you want to delete any of these guides make sure you're clicked on it and press the delete key on your keyboard and the final thing i want you to note is that you won't see any of these guides when you print that's it for this lesson i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to this course on video 2019 it's now time for us to look at page setup and sizes so for this we're going to be working on the design tab and the first group that we have here is the page setup group so let's dive straight into the dialog box by clicking the diagonal arrow and let's take a look at what we've got in here so in this page setup dialog box we have six different tabs now i don't want you to be too concerned about the last two at the moment we're mainly going to focus on these first four tabs now the first three of these tabs all relate to size the next tab along page properties lets you specify if this page is a foreground or a background page now we haven't covered that yet so just hold that in your memory because we are going to come back to a bit later on and just as a side note all the pages that we've created so far have been foreground pages now something else you can also see in this tab is the name of the page so by default visio gives all pages page 1 page 2 page 3 so on and so forth and of course you can change these pages much like you might rename a worksheet tab in excel so currently i have the default name of page one and i'm going to change this to [Music] shapesdemo01 and if there is a background page of course i can select it here but as i said we're going to come back to that a bit later on something else i can also do in this tab is i can select my measurement units so if i click the drop down mine's currently set to inches as the default but i could have feet and inches yards miles so on and so forth and i also have decimal versions of these measurements as well it's worth noting that depending on what template you use some of the measurement units will already be defined in the template but if you want to you can jump into here and change those measurement units to suit whatever it is that you're doing and you can change the measurement units for each page of your drawing so if you have a drawing that has six pages you could use a different measurement unit on each page if you wanted to so let's click on apply and what you'll notice is at the bottom the page has now changed to shapes demo01 now these measurement units correspond to the size of the object or the entity being drawn so when you're using visio it's likely that sometimes you will draw things that are physical entities and sometimes they aren't so the shapes that we've drawn so far on this particular page are just shapes they don't represent physical objects and therefore they have no physical size and if i was to print this drawing it would just look like some shapes on a page some objects there are other templates for things like flowcharts again which have no size associated with them because they're not physical things so in the case of something like a flowchart the physical size and the drawing size is the same so with that in mind let's click across to the drawing scale tab and if we take a look at the drawing scale for this page you can see it has a one-to-one representation so the physical size is the same as the page size let's switch across to exercise one where we have our office layout and take a look at the difference so if we look at the drawing scale for this office plan in this case we're representing a physical entity an office there is a physical size for the thing that we're drawing so we use a scale to represent it and there are a number of standard scales available now in this case the template that i used has used the standard architectural scale and aside from these predefined scales you can also set your own custom scale at the bottom here so what does this page represent well it represents a drawing that is 22 feet by 17 feet it's a physical size and that is represented by that single page in the drawing so given my drawing and the scale it will fit onto one page and my page size is one page of standard letter letter-sized paper so if i wanted to print this i could go to the print setup tab and choose the letter paper size now if i did want to use a different size of paper i could rescale the picture using print zoom alternatively i could say that i don't want to rescale the picture and i can specify that the picture can be spread across different pages so if i wanted to here i could change the printer paper size so maybe i want to set it to the paper size that we generally use in the uk which is a4 and then i could choose to print this drawing over multiple pages of a4 and we're going to be looking at printing in a lot more detail later on so let's jump back to our office layout and let's suppose we need to make the office longer so i'm going to click on the outside boundary line to select the office and you can see as soon as i do that i get my measurements appear so i can see exactly what those sizes are i'm going to grab this resize handle on the right hand side and i'm going to drag the office out a bit to make it longer and you'll see as i do that those measurements change so now part of my office is outside of my drawing it's actually on the canvas so how can i accommodate this extra length well i can click on the auto size button in my page setup group which is going to expand that paper size out let's jump back into our page setup options and you can see in the preview window here the printer paper where that ends and then the drawing paper so essentially what vizio has done is given me a second piece of paper i can see the page break down the middle so i know that if i print this it's going to print across two pieces of paper now essentially what vizio has done here is it's made the decision for me it's auto expanded and given me a second piece of paper and that's controlled underneath the page size tab this first option here let vizio expand the page as needed if i didn't have this selected then it's not going to give me that second piece of paper so i'm going to cancel out of here now this time i'm going to make sure that i have auto size turned off so when i drag the office out again the picture is now too big to fit on the paper so this time i'm going to jump into my page setup options and take charge of this myself by manually changing my page size so let's jump across to the page size tab and this time i'm going to use a custom size and i'm going to change this to let's try 14 inches and click on apply i can see that just about accommodates it let's change this to let's do 15 to give it a little bit more room and click on apply and okay so now i have a bigger piece of electronic paper for this drawing now if the custom size that i set means that the drawing is going to go across two pages what you'll see is a vertical page break line down your drawing i don't have one of those currently so it means that this is going to fit onto one page and if i just quickly check my print preview by going to file and down to print i can see that yes everything is fitting nicely on one page that is it for this lesson i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to the course it is now time for us to do exercise two and in this exercise i would simply like you to draw a set of traffic lights this is going to be a bit different to simply drawing out this traffic light system as i'm going to give you some exact measurements so the paper size needs to be 120 millimeters by 240 millimeters which is not a standard page size it's a custom size and i'd like you to use metric units i need the body of the traffic lights and when i say body i mean the rectangular section without the pointy triangle on the top i need the rectangle to be 80 millimeters wide and 160 millimeters high and then each of these three traffic lights in the middle is 40 millimeters in diameter and i want you to make sure that they are equally spaced from each other and then finally i want you to color in these circles using your shape fill commands see how you get along with that if you need to check my answer you'll find it in the exercise files folder that's it for now i will see you in the next lesson hello everyone and welcome back to this course on vizio 2019. in this lesson we're going to take a look at drawing tools now we've used some of these already in this course but i'm going to explain to you in a little bit more detail how they work now when you're putting together a drawing quite often you're going to use shapes from your stencils but it's worth remembering that you do always have an available set of drawing tools that can be useful to add squares lines circles to any drawing so currently on the screen i have open so i have the course zero five drawing open on the screen and what i ultimately want to do here is delete all of these shapes off of the page now before i do that i need to make a selection so one way that i can select everything that i have on my page is to make sure that i'm clicked on my page and press the control a keyboard shortcut and ctrl a just really means select all and then of course what i can do is press the delete key on my keyboard to get rid of all of those shapes so now that we have essentially a blank canvas to work with let's take a look at some of our drawing tools and you'll find your drawing tools on the home tab in the tools group and if we go up to this little icon just here where we have this blank rectangle and click the drop down you'll see that we have six different drawing tools available so i'm going to select the rectangle and you'll see as soon as i do that when i move my mouse back onto my drawing the cursor is changed to a very small cross and it's showing me a little graphical representation of the drawing tool that i've selected so in this case the rectangle tool so all i need to do now is click and drag and i can draw a rectangle of any size now you'll see that once i let go if i drag my mouse around on the page you can see that i still have that drawing tool active because i can still see that little icon so if i want to draw another shape i can simply carry on going i don't have to reselect the rectangle tool now one thing you might notice is with these drawing tools i don't have a square and i don't have a circle instead i have a rectangle and an ellipse so if i now wanted to draw a square i would use the rectangle drawing tool and when i drag i need to hold down the shift key which is going to give me a square and the same thing pretty much applies to if you're using the ellipse you can see if i just drag i'm going to get this oval shape if i want a circle hold down shift when i drag and it gives me a nice equal circle now because the cursor stays in drawing tool mode once you've finished drawing your circle if you want to exit out of this mode and just go back to your regular cursor or your pointer tool as we call it you can just jump back up to tools and select pointer tool and then your cursor will be back to normal now with any of these shapes that you draw on the page you can of course format them so if i select this first rectangle and right click i have a format shape menu item in my contextual menu this is going to open up the format shape pane on the right hand side and i can choose a fill color so i'm going to say i want to solid fill i'm going to choose a color from the palette so let's do a nice burgundy color and the line controls the border of that shape so again if i want a solid line i might say that i want a black border and i'm going to change the width to two points click on the drawing and you can see that formatting applied i'm just going to undo those changes that i've made and take it back to a regular shape if i decided that i wanted to format all of the shapes that i currently have on my drawing again i need to select them all by pressing ctrl a i can then use the format shape panel and i can change all of them at the same time now we're going to be looking at formatting shapes and other items in a lot more detail later on in this course but hopefully that gives you a better understanding of some of the basics what i would recommend is that you now practice drawing some shapes on your page and maybe even utilizing some of the tools that we haven't used yet such as the line freeform arc and pencil have a little play around with that see how you get on and then when you're ready you can join me in the next lesson hello everyone and welcome back to this course on visio 2019 in this lesson we are going to continue on the subject of shapes but this time i'm going to show you how you can select shapes hopefully by this point in the course you are comfortable with putting shapes on a page and in visio you may have dozens or hundreds of shapes on a drawing and it might be that you need to select one or multiple at any given time now it's a reasonably simple process to select an individual shape we can simply click on the shape and once we see those little handles those resize handles around the outside we know that that shape is selected but if you have a lot of shapes on the page it's a pretty inefficient way of selecting shapes for example if i want to change the background fill color of all of these shapes i could go through selecting them all individually by holding down my ctrl key and clicking my mouse and that might work fine if i've just got a few on the page but if i have a lot particularly if those shapes are overlapping or they're quite small that's a really inefficient and fiddly way of working so i want to find a method of being able to select multiple shapes easily and then performing an action on all of them so let's take a look at the different ways that we can make selections so as we've seen individual shapes can be selected by clicking and then you can either hold down control to select other shapes or you can hold down the shift key which is going to do pretty much exactly the same thing now one thing you might notice when i do this if i just do that again if i select these two shapes you can see that i get a bounding box around the outside if i now go and select the circle that bowden box expands and it kind of gives the impression that all of the shapes are included within this selection but they're actually not only the shapes that currently have a blue border around the outside are the ones that i have selected within this bounding box so this rectangle in the middle and this square i didn't select and so whilst they look like they're part of the selection they're actually not so just be aware of that so now i have those three shapes selected i can right click my mouse and go to format shape and then if i want to i can change these to a completely different color so let's make those purple another way to select multiple shapes is to draw a rectangle around them and again this might be a method that you're used to using in an application like powerpoint now to do this you need to make sure that you have the pointer tool selected so you don't want to have any of these drawing tools selected make sure your cursor is an arrow click your mouse and then just drag a rectangle around everything that you want to select so if i want to select everything i can do that and you can see that all of the shapes have that blue border showing me that they're all selected let's click away if i draw a rectangle around just these top two shapes it will just select those two shapes now what if i want to use this method to select shapes that aren't necessarily next to each other so if i want to select all of the purple shapes currently that's a bit tricky for me to do using the bounding box because it's going to include those red shapes as well well in this case i could use the lasso tool so you'll find the lasso tool on the home tab all the way over in the editing group on the end click the drop down underneath select and you can see that currently i have area select highlighted so that's the one that i'm currently using that's the rectangle box that i'm drawing around but if i choose lasso select i can then use that to make more specific selections so this time i can draw a free form shape around what i want to select so i want just the purple shapes so i'm going to draw all the way around the outside join it up and now only those shapes are selected and just for fun i'm going to right click format the shape and then i'm going to change the background fill one more time to this blue kind of color now i'm going to go back to that select option and i'm going to change this back to area select now if i draw a rectangle again and maybe i only select half of the rectangle below you can see that the rectangle isn't included in my selection but because i didn't draw the rectangle around the entire shape only part of it so anything that's not completely enclosed within that rectangle box is not included in the selection now you can change this if you want to through your visio options so let's jump up to file and down to options i'm going to go to the advanced page and you'll find this under the editing options group and it's this option just here select shapes partially within area so if i select this and click on ok now if i was to draw and partially select the third rectangle it's going to include that in my selection now when it comes to things like cutting copying and duplicating shapes that works how you would expect and i would say if you are reasonably familiar with other microsoft applications you're not going to have too many surprises just here so let's click on the circle and i'm going to copy this circle by pressing ctrl c and then i'm going to press ctrl v to paste it and you can see that the pasted copy appears slightly offset from the original i can then drag that and position it wherever i like let's undo ctrl z a couple of times now another thing i can do here is i can choose to paste my shape somewhere specific so let's stick with a circle i'm going to press ctrl c to copy if i click somewhere up here in my drawing and do control v you can see it's going to paste wherever i'm clicked and then i can move it into place this time i'm going to select three different shapes by just dragging my rectangle tool around the outside i'm going to do a ctrl c again to copy and this time i'm going to paste them onto a new page so all the way down to the bottom of the screen let's click the plus to insert a new page and if i do control v it's going to paste those shapes in exactly the same location as they are sitting on the original page so that helps you achieve a level of consistency when you're copying and pasting shapes between different pages now something else you might want to do instead of copying and pasting is simply duplicate a shape particularly if you've made a lot of changes to the shape formatting changes and you want another shape that's basically exactly the same duplica is a nice quick option so let's take this rectangle at the top and there's a couple of ways that i can duplicate the quickest is to press the ctrl d keyboard shortcut to give yourself an exact replica let's control z to undo the other way you can duplicate a shape is to hold down the ctrl key and drag and drop that shape and it's going to give you an exact copy so as i said all of this functionality is pretty much standard across all of the microsoft applications but it's definitely something that you need to be familiar with in order to work efficiently in visio 2019 hello everyone and welcome back to this course on visio 2019. in this lesson we're going to explore resizing and rotating shapes in a bit more detail because these two types of operations can be particularly important and i'm going to start out this lesson in a slightly unusual way i'm going to start by issuing a warning and i'm going to demonstrate the essence of the warning at the end of this section and that warning is when you use templates it's possible that some of the shapes might be locked in some way and i'll show you a bit later on how to recognize if a shape is locked now a consequence of a shape being locked is that many things are restricted for example you can't resize a locked shape now it might be that you receive a visio drawing from a colleague or someone else and there's nothing you can do about the fact that the shapes are locked so you might just have to accept it the alternative is knowing how to unlock shapes now i just wanted to mention this right at the beginning of this lesson but because it might be that you receive a drawing with lock shapes in it and you might be thinking that you're doing something wrong so i just want to highlight to you that sometimes shapes are locked which is going to prevent you from resizing rotating and basically doing anything with those shapes so now we've got that warning out of the way let's dive into speaking about resizing now we've already explored this a little bit in previous modules if i click on this first rectangle you'll see i get those resize handles around the outside and you might hear these also referred to as selection handles and you can grab any of these handles and resize this shape and remember if you want to maintain the aspect ratio of the shape use the diagonal handles in the corner to drag out and it will resize accordingly now this time i'm going to select another shape so i'm going to hold down shift and i'm going to select the red square towards the bottom now remember i only have two of those shapes selected within that bounding box now when i select multiple shapes if i use these resize handles that's going to resize both of these shapes it doesn't resize anything else other than my selections that are contained within that bounding box and resizing is pretty much as simple as that now for the next part of this lesson i'm going to need to make sure that i have the dynamic grid turned on so up to the view tab and in the visual aids group just check to make sure that you have a tick in the dynamic grid box now we've already seen how you can use the dynamic grid when it comes to resizing shapes so if i select this red rectangle just here and i start to resize it as soon as that rectangle is the same size as something else on that page so in this case the green rectangle just above it i'm going to get those dynamic grid handles and the same thing with this circle if i start to make that a bit smaller as soon as it matches the dimensions of another shape that i have on my page it's going to indicate that to me so in this case it is now the same size as the square and what you'll probably find is that you use the dynamic grid for resizing a lot so let's now take a look at some examples of rotating shapes and you can see on my drawing here i have a single shape i'm going to select it and you can see that right at the top we have the rotation handle and we've looked at this in previous lessons i can click and i can drag it around in order to rotate this shape now something that i haven't pointed out thus far is that if you look carefully inside the shape you'll see a tiny little line going to another handle and just to make this a bit easier to see i'm going to format this shape so that it has a white background so now that makes it a little bit easier you can see that line moving towards a tiny circle in the middle and that circle in the middle is essentially the center of rotation or the pin as it's known in visio and when i rotate an object i'm basically rotating around that pin now we're going to come back to this pin in a moment because it is very important now something else i want to show you is if we jump up to the view tab and in the show group i'm going to click on task panes and i'm going to turn on the size and position task pane and this opens up the size and position window and this is a very useful window with positional information so i can see the x and y position i can see the width of the shape the height the angle of rotation which currently is zero degrees and the pin position which currently is center center now i'm just very quickly going to close this window by clicking on the cross in the bottom left hand corner and show you a different way of accessing this information you can see that when i have this shape selected if you look down in the status bar i can see the width height and angle information down here as well now if you don't see these then if you right click on your status bar you can customize the information that you're seeing so i have all of these selected up here width height length and angle so i can view this information without actually having to pull up that task pane what i can do is i can use this status bar and if i click on where it says width it's going to pop up that size and position window and because i clicked on width it's highlighting the width field if i click on height it's going to pop up the same box but it's going to jump to the height field now not only does this window give you information it also lets you change the information as well so i can change the height by clicking in the field and i'm going to change this to let's say 2 inches hit enter and you'll see that that shape has now resized and because it's a square that i've drawn it's going to maintain that aspect ratio and also modify the width and what you'll see is if i click on this shape pick it up and start to drag it around the x and y positions are going to change relative to where i've placed my shape on the drawing if i grab the rotation handle and start to rotate it round again you can see that information is displayed in the size and position window and if i wanted to i could also manually set the angle of rotation so let's say 35 degrees hit enter and it's going to rotate the shape accordingly now we mentioned pin position a bit earlier on in this lesson and just as a reminder the pin is that little circle in the center and it's basically the point that the shape rotates around so currently in my size and position window it's telling me that my pin position is center center now if i click in here and click the drop down i have different positions for my pin so if i select top right for example and then i rotate my shape it's now going to rotate around a pin in the top right hand corner if i change it to let's say bottom left it's going to rotate it round a pin placed in the bottom left hand corner so don't forget about these little options in the size and position window now let's take a look at one final thing before we finish up this lesson i'm going to introduce a second shape so let's jump back to our home tab i'm going to grab the ellipse drawing tool and i'm just going to draw an oval shape now what would happen if i was to select both of these shapes so let's hold down shift and click on the square we can see that the size and position window is just showing the information for the ellipse but what if i was to jump into here and let's say change the height to 4 inches and hit enter it changes both of the shapes because that's what i have selected if i change the angle of rotation so let's change this to 60 degrees again it's going to rotate both of the shapes so you can essentially use this size and position window to set values for multiple shapes at the same time so the final point i want to mention and we are leaping ahead a little bit now but i think this is important for you to know at this stage and that is dealing with locked shapes and i mentioned this briefly at the beginning of this lesson as a bit of a warning so let's take a look at an example i'm going to undo a few times just to reset these shapes back to how they were now as we've already mentioned if i rotate this shape i have my pin position set to center center and this is allowing me to rotate round that center pin position i can also freely resize this shape so currently this shape doesn't appear to be locked as i can perform these different actions on it now in order to demonstrate locking to you i need to make sure i turn on the developer tab now you may or may not have this turned on i currently don't which is why you can't see it as one of my tabs running across the top of the screen and i would say in general developer isn't turned on by default but it's simple enough to do let's jump across to the file tab go down to options and we need to select the customize ribbon page and on the right hand side this shows all of the tabs that we have enabled in vizio and if you take a look three quarters of the way down this list you can see that we have developer with no tick in the box so let's tick this and click on ok and the developer tab is now showing at the top of the screen now there's lots of different things on this developer ribbon we're not going to look at most of them right now but i do want to draw your attention to this shape design group because that is where we will find our protection option so this is essentially how you can lock a shape to prevent it being changed and you have all these different things in here that you can choose from so all the different things you want to be able to protect so i want to protect this shape from having its width height x position and also rotation changed and if i click on ok what you'll now notice is that those resize handles now have a little line through them so it's kind of like a no entry sign basically telling me that this shape is locked and i can't resize it and if i try and do any resizing you'll see that that's not possible you'll see that i can't move this shape from left to right because i've locked it but i can move it up and down because the only thing that i left open was the y position so x is locked i can't move it side to side but why i can move it so essentially you can choose to lock the entire shape or you can lock specific elements to prevent anyone else from changing the shape so that is locking and i would say if you receive a visio drawing and you see shapes that have these kind of handles around the outside then you will find that you're limited in what you can do with that shape that's it for this lesson i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back by this point in the course you should be reasonably fine with moving shapes around resizing them and rotating them so we're now going to move on to another important task and that is connecting shapes together so in this first demonstration i'm going to show you how to connect shapes together that isn't particularly good and then i'm going to show you some better options so what i want to do here is i want to connect these two shapes the square and the circle using a straight line so let's take a look at a method that works but isn't particularly the most efficient so let's jump up to the home tab and i'm going to go to my drawing tools and i'm going to select line and watch what happens when i drag my mouse close to the square connection points pop up on each side of that square and if i hover over one i get that green square and it says glue to connection point so let's click and drag towards the circle as soon as i get near the circle again i get connection points so let's connect it up to this one i'm going to say yes glue to connection point so essentially this is now glued at both ends now there is a big advantage to this and that is if i was to move this circle then the line is going to move with it because it's glued to its connection point and the type of glue that we've used here is referred to as static glue now there's one important aspect to this if i click on the line again you can see that at each end we have different coloured dots so the one that's attached to the square is a solid green circle whereas the other one is a white circle with a green dot in the middle and this indicates two different types of glue that are being used now i'm going to delete out this line just by pressing the delete key and i'm going to do this process again but this time i'm going to do it wrong so let's grab a line drawing tool let's grab at a connection point but this time instead of gluing to a connection point i'm just going to glue to the outline of this circle and you can see when i hover over the outline not on a connection point i get that little screen tip that says snap to geometry so let's let go so now my shapes are essentially only glued at one end because they're glued to a connection point on the square but i just snapped to the geometry on the circle so now if i was to move this circle the line doesn't move with it because i've just snapped it but if i move the square the line does travel with it because it's glued at one end and if i want to very quickly glue this circle back to the line if i pull the circle over i just need to make sure that i connect where i have that green square and now it's glued at both ends now whilst using glue is a really great way to connect two shapes it does have its problems so let's add in another shape i'm going to add a triangle this time and i'm going to delete out this connection line and place the triangle in the middle now i'm going to have a bit of a problem here because i want to connect the square to the circle but the triangle is in the middle so essentially i would need to go through that triangle so we need to work out a way to draw around an obstacle now we're going to do this using something called connectors but before we do let me show you a bad way of doing this so if i want to connect the square with the circle and avoid the triangle i could choose to use a freeform line so let's jump back up to our drawing tools and select freeform so what i could do here is i could glue to connection point and then kind of drag around the triangle and connect to the circle so that kind of works but it is a little bit messy looking it's not going to be good if you're trying to put together a professional looking diagram it is also worth noting that with this freeform tool you can see that we also have little connection points running along this line and if i use my pointer tool to select it i can move this line in and out to make further adjustments now what you'll see with this is that if i move the circle the line is going to move with it but at a certain point of moving this round that line again is going to crash into that triangle now what i could do is i could make a modification and just drag it up so that it still avoids that obstacle but all in all this isn't a great way of doing this it looks pretty messy and not very professional so let's take a look at a much better way of circumnavigating obstacles so let's delete out this line get rid of that and just move our circle back again and move our square up so this time i'm going to use something called a connector and again you'll find this up in the tools group on the home tab just below the pointer tool so now if i hover close to the square i can click drag and connect to a point on the circle and that point can be any one of these connection points so let's say this one glue to connection point and you can see that vizio has intelligently worked out a route around the obstacle in the middle and because we've glued if i move this object down it's going to move that path and work out the best route now most of the time vizio does a pretty good job at avoiding any obstacles or if you do come across an instance where you want to move this line manually then you can definitely do that as well simply by dragging and dropping now at this stage if i was to delete out this triangle so there's no longer an obstacle there vizio doesn't automatically change this connector so it's taking the shortest possible route i would need to change that manually so because i'm just essentially joining two objects together i don't really need this crazy root that it's taken so i could drag it down and make that a little bit neater or i could just delete the line entirely and basically start again so select my connection point like so now let's delete out this connector once again and i've still got the connector selected and what i'm going to do here is i'm going to drag a line but i'm not going to connect to one of the connection points i'm going to connect to a different point on the circle and you'll see as i hover over the border of the circle it says glue to shape so i've glued this connector to the shape as opposed to to a connection point and this is what we call dynamic glue i could do this going the other way as well so let's grab another connector i'm going to click on a connection on the circle this time i'm going to drag across towards the square and you'll see that as soon as i drag away from that connection point the entire square goes green so at this time i'm gluing to shape as opposed to a connection point let go and then when i drag these around they move with the shape so now essentially i have two shapes connected using dynamic glue as i drag these objects around vizio adjusts those connection points at each stage now the final point i want to mention here before we leave this lesson is our glue options because if we're going to be doing a lot of gluing it's important to have these set correctly so let's jump up to view and into the visual aids dialog box and the column that i want to draw your attention to is this final column here glue to now if you think you're going to be using dynamic glue and static glue a reasonable amount you want to make sure you have shape geometry and also connection points selected in this column that's it for this lesson i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to the course in this very short lesson we're going to discuss one other topic about shapes before moving on to a different subject and that is shape replacement now this feature was introduced in visio 2013 to cover situations where you have a shape in use in your drawing and you want to change it to another shape and that sounds like a fairly simple thing to do but believe it or not it used to be the case that you would have to delete out the current shape and then insert a new one so in this lesson all i really want to show you is how you can change shapes in your diagrams so for this we're using our favorite office layout drawing and maybe i want to change this waste paper bin to maybe a different type of waste paper bin maybe a plant maybe something else entirely so essentially what i want to do here is i want to replace the shape so all i need to do here is select the shape jump up to the home tab and all the way over in the editing group on the end you can see an option there for change shape and the first thing that's going to pop up is the office accessories stencil so this is essentially the stencil that the particular object that i've got selected is part of and the good thing about this is that this is a live preview so if i want to get an idea as to what this plan is going to look like i can hover over or maybe a square bin instead of a round bin now if i want to choose a shape from a completely different stencil if i click the drop down underneath office accessories you can see i have access to cubicles office equipment office furniture so on and so forth i can even choose to select something from my quick shapes so anything i've saved into there and also i could choose to pull up just the shapes in use in this document now for this i'm going to go back to office accessories i'm going to change this round waste bin to a square waistbin now much like any other shape i can also change multiple shapes at the same time so these three plants that we have in the middle of the office i can select all three by holding down my shift key go to change shape and then i can choose to change all three of them to something else so let's choose a flowering plant just here instead click and all of those shapes are changed at the same time that's it for shape replacement short and sweet i'm going to head over to the next lesson now and i look forward to you joining me hello everyone and welcome back to the course in this lesson we're going to talk about text basics and we've already seen how we can add text we've played around with text a little bit but we're going to continue that on because believe it or not there is quite a lot to it and the main thing i want to talk to you about in this particular video is text boxes versus text shapes i want to make sure that you're clear on the distinction between the two so i have course file 10 open on the screen which currently doesn't have anything in it so let's change that and grab a circle from our basic shapes and drag it onto the diagram and i'm going to use my zoom slider at the bottom just to zoom in a little bit so this is a little bit easier for you to see now without clicking anywhere else i currently have the shape selected but if i start to type the word circle you can see it appears inside a text box within the circle and what you'll find is that most shapes that you'll use in visio have text boxes already assigned with them and if there is a text box it's mostly there to identify the shape and that could be any kind of shape not just necessarily a basic shape if maybe you've dragged something onto the office layout for example you might have a label inside which says desk or maybe plant pot or something like that so much of the text that you see in a drawing is normally associated with a shape now there is also a different type of shape called a text shape and you would use text shapes to put text on a drawing that isn't necessarily associated with a specific shape so you might use a text shape to put a title on the drawing and you'll find that option on the home tab in the tools group and it's this little option here which says text and and you can see that there is a keyboard shortcut for that of control plus two so if i click this i can go to the top of my drawing and i can add a text shape which contains something like a heading now we're going to come back to this and do some formatting a bit later on but remember your text shape tool is still selected until you click back on the pointer tool to do something else so we've seen texts associated with a shape we've seen how you can use the text shape option to add text that's not associated with a shape and the third type of text is a text block so let me show you a quick example if i select this circle and then go up to the home tab and back into that tools group there's another little option just here called text block and what you can now see is that there is a rectangle around the outside of that text with sizing handles so this is what i'm now looking at a text block so currently this text block is nearly as big as the circle and you can see that i have the text in the middle and what i can do here is i can change the size of the text and also the block so if i wanted the word circle to appear towards the top i can change the alignment within the text block and i'm going to talk morty about alignment a little bit later on alternatively i could reshape the text block itself by dragging these resize handles in now one thing that's worth noting is that not all shapes have text boxes right in the middle so for example if i open up the computers and monitor stencil i'm going to grab the terminal shape and just drag and drop that onto my drawing now if i want to identify where the text block is for this particular shape what i need to do is make sure that i have the shape selected up to my tools and click on text block and you can see that the text block is underneath the terminal and i have resizing handles so i can drag that out so what i can do here is maybe type in a label something like debs and that appears underneath the shape so the point i'm trying to make here is that where that text block appears will vary depending on the shape now if you have text blocks like this you can move the block relative to the shape so if i wanted this text block to be somewhere else i could move it up onto that terminal screen i'm going to use those resize handles let's drag it down a bit and i've now got it positioned inside that screen so you can move around those text block labels now the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to go back to my basic shapes i'm going to drag a circle onto the drawing and i'm just going to make that quite a bit bigger and before i start typing any text into here i'm going to apply some formatting to the text to make it a lot bigger so up on the home tab in the font formatting group i'm going to keep the font on calibri but i am going to change the size to let's say 24 points and i'm going to type in the word circle again now if i select the circle and i want to identify the text block remember click on the text block button and it's going to show you that what i'm going to do now is change the alignment of this text using the alignment tools in the paragraph group on that home tab so i could for example align this to the top of that text block so don't forget about your alignment tools up here if you want to align something within your text block now i'm going to make this circle a little bit smaller and you'll notice even though i'm making the circle smaller the text size is staying the same 24 points let's move that down a little bit and i'm going to drag a square from my basic shape stencil and place that on the drawing once again i'm going to change the font size to 24 points and i'm going to type the word square now you can see at the moment that this square is essentially upright but look what happens when i use the rotation handle to rotate this object around as i rotate the text also rotates with the square now that might be exactly the effect that you want to achieve but sometimes you might want to be able to rotate the shape but have the text stay in the fixed position so if i want to keep the word square horizontal and just rotate the shape all i need to do is select the text block use the rotation handle and just rotate the text block back to where it should be and now i have the shape rotated but the text remains horizontal so the point here is remember that these are independent of each other so you can rotate the shape but also choose if you want to rotate the text block as well as the shape now i'm going to put this square back to how it was let's select that text block and also rotate that background so now let's take a look at what happens if we use some connectors so i'm going to connect the circle with the square and we're going to do this by using a connector so up to the tools group and click on connector i'm going to select this point on the circle and i'm going to drag it across to this point on the square and let's just make sure those are in line i'm gonna move the square down a little bit now one thing that you might not be aware of is that connectors also have text blocks so if i select the connector and click on text block you can see those resize handles where that text block is so let's give this a label i'm going to call this connector and then i'm going to select all three shapes so let's click back on our pointer tool i'm going to draw a rectangle around everything and look what happens when i choose to rotate all three objects notice that the text on the connector always stays upright and that's because the text block on connectors will only align horizontally or vertically so that's just another little tip that's useful for you to know now so far we've been looking at text blocks associated with shapes so let's now focus back on our text shape and if you remember this is what you use if you want to add text to a drawing that isn't necessarily associated to a shape so something like a header as we've used it in this example and remember once you have your text shape you can then format it so i'm going to click on text basics and i'm going to use all of the tools in my font formatting group to change the way that this title looks so let's make it bold let's increase its size to 36 points maybe i want to align that to the left and i can also do things like change the color and if i wanted to change something specific with one of these words if i double click i can then select a specific word and let's just make this italics if you've used any other kind of microsoft application maybe word or excel you'll probably find this pretty straightforward as most of the options we're using here are exactly the same across all of the microsoft applications and of course if we decided that we wanted to make a universal change to all of the text on our diagram we can press the control a keyboard shortcut to select everything and then maybe i could choose to change this to a completely different font so let's go for something like this so those are all the different ways that you can add text onto your drawing that's it for this lesson i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to the course in this lesson we're going to talk about proofing in visio and by proofing i mean spelling and grammar checking now i would say that if you've used proofing tools in a microsoft application before maybe something like word or excel or maybe even powerpoint then you can probably skip this section as it does basically work the same but if this is all new to you then stay tuned because this is a very important aspect of using vizio now the first thing i'd like to draw your attention to here is the help file on spell checking in visio we're going to cover some of these points but there are a lot of other topics related to spelling and grammar that you might want to further explore and further read up about so don't forget that you do have the help files there to guide you now when it comes to spell checking in visio what i've found is that a lot of people don't consider it to be important and that's mainly because physio isn't technically a text-based package like word the essence of the work that you're doing here is creating drawings however some of those drawings as we've already seen will contain text and you also might have some other miscellaneous text items on your page so it is important to make sure that you are spell checking prior to sending this diagram to others now a little bit of a word of warning before we get started when it comes to labeling and putting text on drawings the way that you do it might not be considered good and accurate grammar and what i mean by that is that when you're labeling up something we tend to use ungrammatically correct phrases when we're doing our labeling and those phrases might be something that the spell checker flags is incorrect when it's actually as you meant it to be so in some cases the spell checker can be a little bit more of a hindrance than a help but i'm going to leave that up to you to decide so let's run through some of the basics of spell checking now when you are spell checking in vizio you really have two choices you can spell check as you go or you can spell check as a specific exercise at the end so once you've completed your diagram you might just want to run a spell check on the entire file but let's talk about checking spelling as we go first so what i'm going to do here is just add a rectangle shape onto the screen and i'm going to make this text reasonably big so let's make this 36 points and i'm going to type the word rectangle but you can see that i've made a spelling error and if you have the option to spell check as you go turned on you'll see that as soon as i type the space after the word rectangle vizio has picked up that i've spelt this word incorrectly and it's highlighted it with a red squiggly line underneath so that tells me that i need to take some kind of corrective action so essentially what it's doing is it's flagging the errors as i type them now some people really like that option i am one of those people and some people don't so let me show you where you can customize this setting if we jump up to file and go all the way down to visio options and we want to make sure that we're on the proofing page and right at the bottom here we have when correcting spelling in visio check spelling as you type and you can see that i have a check in that box now if you determine after you've been using vizio for a while that this is more of a hindrance to you than a help and you'd prefer to just spell check at the end you can deselect this option and you won't get those red squiggly lines when you make errors now i'm going to leave mine checked and click on ok now if vizio does flag an error as i'm typing i can choose to correct it now or i can choose to correct it at the end if i wanted to correct this now the quickest way of doing that is to right click on the word and you can see at the top here it gives me a couple of other suggestions so vizio has worked out that i was probably trying to type the word rectangle and that is the first choice that i have at the top of the list i can also choose to ignore so if this is actually a valid word and sometimes physio will pick up things like people's names or maybe countries or names of brands and because it doesn't recognize them it flags them as errors and they might not necessarily be errors so you can choose to ignore or you can choose to add that word to the dictionary i'm going to talk a bit more about that a bit later on for the time being i'm going to make the correction i'm going to select the first item in this list and change that to rectangle now if you don't want to flag errors as you type you can at any point invoke the spell check and there's a couple of different ways that you can do that you can go up to the review tab and in the proofing group the first option you have there is spelling and you'll see as i hover over i get that screen tip and you can see the keyboard shortcut and that is f7 so you can invoke this at any point or you can wait until the end when you've completed your diagram and then just press f7 to bring up that spell check so once again you can see that it's starting at the beginning of this drawing it's picked up the word rectangle that isn't in the dictionary and it suggested the word rectangle so you're always going to see all the different suggestions from here if the word you meant to spell is in there just select it and then click on change now the other options that you have are you can choose to ignore and in general i would use ignore if it's a word that i've actually spelt correctly but vizio for some reason just isn't recognizing it and if i have that word repeated throughout the drawing i could choose to ignore all so it doesn't keep flagging it another thing i could do is add the word to the dictionary so again this is a good option if it keeps picking up things like company names people's names things that you know are spelt correctly it's just not being recognized by vizio's internal dictionary once you add a word to the dictionary it will no longer flag as a spelling error but in this case i want to change it to rectangle so i'm just going to click on the word change it then moves on to the next misspelled word which in this case is ellipse i can see that yes i meant to spell it like the suggestion so i'm going to say change and then finally we have the word free form and i'm going to change that as well once i'm done it's telling me that my spelling check is complete so i can click on ok so those are your two options you can check as you type or you can invoke f7 and check at any given time now the final option i want to talk to you about is auto correct and you might want to use autocorrect to correct common spelling mistakes that you might make and you can also use it as a way of inserting special characters for example maybe one mistake that i often make is that i type two capitals at the beginning of a word and i would like vizio to correct this for me now believe it or not this is a fairly common thing that people tend to do if you're holding down the caps lock when you're typing in a capital letter it's very easy to still have it held down when you're typing the second character so you end up with two capital letters at the beginning of a word so we want vizio to auto correct that for us and something else i want vizio to do is add a copyright symbol so if i go down to where it says free form i'm just going to double click to edit this text and we're going to pretend that i accidentally typed in two capital letters at the beginning of this word so i want my autocorrect settings to pick this up and change it for me so we're going to go back up to file into our vizio options and into proofing so let's go into autocorrect options and you'll see the first option that we have here is correct to initial capitals so i want to make sure that i have a tick in this box now if you look further down this same page there are also some key sequences to put in special characters so you can see here that to insert a copyright symbol this is what i need to type so bracket c bracket if i want to insert a euro symbol i type in bracket e bracket so i can use these as a shortcut way of easily and quickly entering in these types of symbols so let's click on ok and click on ok again i'm going to delete out this word and i'm going to type in free form and you'll see as soon as i hit space it's going to correct that and remove that capitalization and if i wanted to add a copyright symbol into this document i just need to type bracket c bracket and again when i hit space it's going to auto correct that to the actual copyright symbol so those are your proofing tools and also your autocorrect tools definitely worth reviewing them and remember if you want to read up more about proofing you have those help files that can guide you in the right direction that's it for this lesson i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to the course it's time for us to do exercise three and in this exercise i would like you to draw a diagram of your home network if you have one if you don't maybe you have a network at work that you can use or maybe you can think of some other kind of network to draw if you don't have any of those things or nothing springs to mind you can basically use my drawing and just recreate the network that i have here now a couple of little tips before you begin remember that each of these shapes has its own text block there is also a drawing title now i've connected most of these shapes together but what you'll notice is that for the ones that connect to the wireless access point i have a different type of shape here so these aren't necessarily connectors so i've used one of the standard shapes to indicate a wireless connection and that is this symbol you can see in between these shapes just here and really i've done it in that way to indicate the difference between wired and wireless connections so see if you can also work out how to do that that should be enough for you to be getting on with as always you can check my answer in the exercise files folder that's it for now i will see you in the next lesson hello everyone and welcome back to the course in this lesson we're going to explore the different ways to pan and zoom around the diagram and we've already seen some aspects of zoom so far in this course but there are a few other features that are definitely worth knowing about so why do we need to pan and zoom well whatever size of diagram that you're working on if it has a lot of detail there might be times where you need to really get close in and work at a very fine level indeed if it's very large you may need to zoom in to see exactly what it is that you're doing and one of the problems that you might find is that if you are zoomed in and you need to see a different part of the diagram there is this tendency to zoom all the way back out and then back in again on the new location now you can avoid this by using the pan feature and what pan allows you to do is pan around the page and keep the same magnification so by using the pan and zoom window this is going to make your life so much easier when it comes to working with large drawings so i'm working in course file 11. now we've already looked at how to zoom in and out we can use our zoom slider in the bottom corner and we can move up and down using our scroll bars now something you might have already discovered when you're using zoom is that it is a little bit frustrating when you're trying to zoom in to a specific place in your diagram so let me show you a couple of techniques to make this a bit easier for you and the first one is zoom to selection so let's say that you want to zoom into this drawing and work on the triangle and also the square if you hold down the control and shift key you'll see that the cursor changes to that small magnifying glass with the plus inside and all you need to do is drag a rectangle around what you want to zoom into when you let go it's going to zoom in to your selection and you can use that tool on any part of your drawing if i wanted to use this again and zoom in on just the triangle i could do exactly the same thing ctrl shift drag a rectangle around the triangle and it's going to zoom in to just the selected item now when you want to zoom back out again if you press ctrl shift w that's going to take you back to your original view you can also zoom using the scroll wheel on your mouse if you have one and remember if you are using the scroll wheel to zoom you need to hold down the control key scroll your mouse up to zoom in and scroll it back to zoom out now there is another option that you can use when it comes to zooming and that is called center selection on zoom and this is actually an option that you need to turn on in your visio options so let's dive into the file menu down to options and we'll find this in the advanced page and it's this option just here underneath editing options center selection on zoom now i will say that most of the time i have this turned off but let me just demonstrate this to you let's turn it on and click on ok and let's select any shape on this drawing so i'm going to go for this diamond at the top now if i use my scroll wheel on my mouse to zoom in you can see that whatever object i have selected it's going to make that the center of the zoom so now we've seen all the options that we have when it comes to zooming let's now switch our attention to the pan and zoom window now the first thing you need to do is go down to your status bar and right click your mouse and you want to make sure that you have the pan and zoom window item checked when you do check this if you take a look at the bottom right hand corner of the status bar you'll see that you have little icon here which is your pan and zoom window now another way to get to this pan and zoom window is to use the view tab and turn on the pan and zoom task pane so let's zoom in on our drawing i'm going to select the circle hold down control and i'm going to zoom in and you'll notice that what i can see is represented in the pan and zoom window by the rectangle so if i'm zoomed into this level of magnification and then i decide that i want to see something else that's on the page instead of zooming out i can just use this pan window and i can drag it around and i keep the same magnification wherever i go so this is useful if you are working on the finer detail of a diagram and you don't want to have to keep zooming out and zooming in you can just pan around and of course there are a few different things that you can do with this blue rectangle in the pan and zoom window for example i can resize this so i can make it smaller or i could even make it a bit larger and include more within that pan window i can also use this slider along the side to zoom in or zoom out and you'll see that that rectangle changes in size as i do this now another thing you might want to do with this pan and zoom window is you might not find it particularly convenient having this down in the right hand corner if you right click on the pan and zoom heading on the side there you have an option to float the window and this means you can then pick it up and you can place it wherever you like and one thing you'll notice is that if i drag up towards the ruler i get the option of kind of snapping it and having it as a pain on the screen now in general i don't particularly like this i think it takes up quite a bit of room i prefer to have it as a little window but sometimes i do like to be able to change the position and a lot of the time i do like to have it in the left hand pane underneath my stencils and of course once you've finished with the pan and zoom window you can click on the cross in the top right hand corner just to close that down i'm going to finish off by doing ctrl shift w to take me back to my original view so that's a few more tips and tricks on zooming and also i've introduced you there the pan and zoom window that's it for this lesson i will see you in the next one hi guys and welcome back to the course in this lesson we're going to cover some important topics related to the vizio workspace and more importantly saving the workspace now this is done automatically when we save and close a file and if you're curious as to what i mean by workspace well in this particular document that i have opened the workspace comprises of the ribbon and the quick access toolbar the shapes window that we have running down the left hand side the actual drawing the drawing window in the middle and also the status bar now all of these things combined together are the workspace it might be that you have additional windows open in your workspace such as the size and position window that we were just looking at and if you take a look down at the zoom slider in the bottom right hand corner for this particular file you can see that it zoomed in to 65 percent and in general what happens here is if i close down this file and then reopen it some aspects will go with drawing and some of them don't so i'm going to select file and save and then i'm going to close down this file now the other drawing that i have open here is my answer to exercise 3. you can see that i have the shapes window open and what i'm going to do here is just minimize that shapes window down to collapse that up i'm also going to change the zoom level for this drawing to 200 so let's go to view and zoom and select 200 and click on ok i'm also going to open the size and position window and remember there is a couple of ways that you can do this but as we're already on the view tab we might as well do it from task panes select size and position to open that window in the bottom left hand corner so now i'm also going to save and then i'm going to close this file down as well now watch what happens if i go back and open up course file 11 you'll open that it opens with a zoom of 65 percent which is what i saved it with but what you'll also notice is that the shapes window is minimized and the size and position window is visible so these were the settings that i set when i last worked on the drawing even though it wasn't this drawing i made these changes in the exercise 3 file so hopefully that illustrates quite nicely that some of the settings such as zoom level will go with the drawing whereas others will display depending on how you last use them so let me expand the shapes window out again and i'm going to close down the size and position window i'm going to save and close this down let's go back in and let's now reopen exercise 3. you can see that it's still zoomed in to 200 percent which is what it was when i last saved it it still has the computers and monitor stencil open but i don't have open that size and position window these two items are reflecting what i last did in the last document i had open so some things are specific to the drawing and get saved and some are how i left them when i closed so hopefully that illustrates how the workspace works now another thing you might want to consider doing when you're looking at your workspace your work area particularly if you're using a device with a small screen you might want to give yourself a bit more working space by collapsing up the ribbon now the ribbon is obviously extremely useful it contains all of our commands but it does take up quite a bit of space at the top and there might be times when you're working on a particularly large drawing when it's going to be beneficial to you to temporarily collapse up the ribbon and this is a fairly straightforward thing to do if we jump up to the ribbon all the way over on the right hand side you can see that there is an up arrow and if i hover over it says collapse the ribbon and there is a keyboard shortcut for this of control f1 so now i have a lot more room to work on my drawing with but obviously i can't see any of my commands i can however still see those tabs so if i need to grab a command if i know where that command is located i can go directly to the tab and this is probably something you'll find you use more when you become more familiar with vizio and you start to know where certain commands are located on the ribbons if i do want to access a ribbon at any given time i can just click on the tab and it's going to drop down if i'm not sure where my command is i can still carry on going through until i find exactly what i'm looking for and when i move away from the ribbon and click back on my drawing that ribbon is going to collapse up again now if at any point you decide that you don't want this to be collapsed any longer then there's a couple of ways that you can essentially pin this ribbon back in place if you right click anywhere on the ribbon just take the tick out of collapse the ribbon or alternatively you can click on the pin icon control f1 on the right hand side and that's going to pin that ribbon back in place and you can then see all of your commands and also the quick access toolbar that's it for this lesson i will see you in the next one hi guys and welcome back to the course in this lesson we're going to talk about some automation features that can really help you work quickly with some types of drawings and in some situations and i should probably point out that how they work will depend on some of the vizio options that you have set so we're going to start out by taking a look at something called autoconnect now before we do we're going to jump into those visio options and just set up everything correctly so let's go into file all the way down to options and we want to make sure that we're on the advanced page in the editing group we want to make sure that we have enable auto connect selected if you don't have a tick in the box pop one in there now and then click on ok now a couple of other things that you need to check on the view tab in the visual aids group also make sure that you have auto connect selected once you have both of those options enabled we can then utilize the auto connect facility so let me show you how it works now what i'm intending to do here is build some kind of network diagram so i have open in my shapes pane the networks and peripherals stencil so i'm going to grab the router just here and i'm going to drag that onto my diagram now with the network diagram i'm probably going to have some other things coming off of this router and to make it super simple i can utilize the auto connect feature so notice what happens when i hover over this router can you see that i get those four blue arrows around the perimeter and these are called your auto connect icons so if i want to add and auto connect another shape in the drawing i can simply hover over one of those blue arrows so if i hover over the one above you can see that it shows four icons and those icons are the first four of my quick shapes for this particular stencil so if what i need to add here is a server all i need to do is hover over the server and when i click it's going to add that shape and it's also going to add a connector as well and that is basically what auto connect does if i hover over my router again you can see that this time i only get three arrows because i've already utilized one of them so if i wanted to add maybe a switch now a switch isn't one of my first four shapes in my stencil and so i'm not seeing it as an option in that auto connect box so a way that i can get around this is by selecting switch in the stencil first and then when i hover over you can see automatically it's going to give me a switch and all i need to do is click to apply it if i wanted to add something from another stencil i could pretty much do the same thing so if i scroll up through my stencils and go to computers and monitors maybe i want to add a pc so if i select it in the stencil first and then hover over my router and let's go for the down arrow you can see there is the pc i can click and it's going to add that in with a connector so this is a really nice quick way of being able to build your diagram another thing to bear in mind when you're using this as it's only going to show the first four items that you have in your quick shapes menu remember that we went through previously how you can add things to quick shapes and also how you can reorder those items so if there's shapes that you always use you might want to make sure that those are the first four in your quick shapes let's move on now and talk about another automation tool that we have called auto add and for auto add i'm going to use the example of a flowchart diagram and we're starting this flow chart from scratch you can see i have my basic flowchart shapes loaded up in my stencils so i'm going to grab the start here and drag that up to the top of my drawing i'm going to use auto connect to add a process box which is this one just here i'm going to add another process box another one and then finally i'm going to add an end point now what if i decide at this stage that i need to introduce a process box in between the first and second process boxes just here well in theory i would need to delete out the connector put the new process box in there and move the two below it to space things out evenly or use two more connectors but we don't need to mess around with all of that we can just employ auto add which is going to do it for us so i'm going to grab the process box and i'm just going to drag it in between the two process boxes that i already have and you can see that the ends of those connectors have changed to green squares which means the auto add is going to be used if i let go vizio is going to insert that new process box in the correct place with connectors and this can be a real time saver as it saves you a lot of messing around deleting out connectors and process boxes and shuffling other things around so essentially what visio does here is it moves parts of the diagram around to accommodate the new shape and when it runs out of space it can do some strange things so you may need to intervene and make some manual alterations and what you can see here is that now my flowchart has extended down onto the second page now the final automation feature i want to speak to you about is something called auto delete and this is used when you want to get rid of a shape so let's select one of these process boxes if i hit the delete key you can see that the process box has been deleted and the two connectors have now been replaced with one now at this stage it's probably good for you to also double check your visio options when it comes to auto deleting so once again we're going to go up to file and options and we want to go to the advanced page and make sure that you have this option selected delete connectors when deleting shapes i would also advise you to turn on enable connector splitting let me show you what happens if i deselect this if i now try to introduce a new process box to this diagram you can see that i don't get those green connectors and if i let go the flowchart kind of organizes and completely misses out this new process box because it doesn't realize that it's part of the same diagram so that is a really really important option if you want to use these features so definitely make sure you have this turned on that's it for this lesson i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to the course in this lesson in the next couple of lessons we're going to take a look at organization charts or org charts as they're referred to and orc charts have been part of vizio since the beginning and many people use vizio to maintain their organization charts so if you need to maintain them from data maybe an hr database you can do that automatically from visio and whilst many of the things that we're going to be covering over the next few lessons specifically relate to org charts many of the tools and techniques that i'm going to show you can also be used more widely as well now if you're unsure what i mean by the term org charts well it depicts an organization a management hierarchy you might have an organization chart on the wall where you work where you have your manager at the top then you have the people that work directly for him maybe the team leaders and then you have the people that report into them now organization charts are not just used in work environments they do have other purposes so so maybe you have the president or prime minister at the top and then you have all of the roles that report into him or her and also many scientific structures could be represented with org charts so for example the taxonomy of all the animals in the world so what i'm trying to say is it doesn't just relate to management structures however that is how we're going to use it in this example now what we're going to do in this first lesson is i'm going to show you how you can draw an organization chart manually and then the next section we're going to basically do a similar thing but i'm going to show you how you can use the org chart wizard and then finally in the third section i'm going to show you how you can style your organization charts so let's not get too far ahead of ourselves let's start off with building a manual organization chart so the first thing i'm going to do here is jump up to file and down to new and if we take a look at our templates you can see that i have the organization chart template sitting just here now for this one i'm actually going to use metric units instead and i'm going to click on create now notice the organization wizard has popped up and we're going to look at this and build an organization chart using this wizard in the next section so for the time being i'm just going to cancel this window now another thing to note is that now that i've loaded up this template you can see that i have a new ribbon the org chart ribbon which contains lots of different commands and tools that's going to help me build and style up my organization charts and another thing you might notice is that this particular template has its own stencil so if you take a look we have organization chart shapes and then we have different masters that we can use to build our organization charts if i hover over the first one the executive belt you can see it says in the screen tip drag onto the page then drop positions that report into this one directly on top of it so we have a little bit of guidance there as to how to build up our charts now in general the executive belt is reserved for ceos people at that top level now before we start to build out this organization chart i just want to draw your attention to this shapes group on the org chart ribbon you can see here that the first one we have is belt the next one along is notch the next one along is pip so on and so forth and these are effectively different styles for your masters and this all really comes down to a matter of personal preference how do you want your shapes to look in your organization chart now for this example i'm just going to stick with the default which is belt now what i'm going to do before we get going is quickly save this file so i'm going to do that off camera and i'll rejoin you in a couple of seconds so let's start building out our organization chart so the person right at the top of the pile is going to be the ceo so i'm going to grab the executive belt master from my stencil and i'm going to drag and drop that onto my page right at the top now let me zoom in a little bit so you can see this a little bit clearer and you can see that i have two text boxes one for the title and one for the name so i'm going to double click in title and we're going to change that to ceo and then i'm going to double click in the name and change that to diane dixon now there are three managers that report into diane and as we saw from that screen tip when you're adding subordinates essentially you need to drag and drop them onto the person that they report into so in this case diane now these people aren't the executive belt they're the next level down so we want to go to the manager belt so let's click and drag and drop on top of diane and you can see it automatically creates that subordinate link it also adds a connector creating a relationship between these two different shapes so let's go in and add a title for this person and this one let's just add my name just here and i am the accounts director now i'm going to add two more managers and i'm going to do them in exactly the same way so join me in a couple of seconds when i'm done we're now going to add in some more people into our organization chart and you can see i'm over here on the left hand side that's me the accounts director and i have one person reporting to me so for this one i want to grab the position belt master i'm going to drop it on top of my card and it's going to add my subordinate let's add in this person's name [Music] and one other thing to note here when you look at these masters is that you do have one called vacancy belt so if you essentially have an open position in your hierarchy then you can utilize this master so let's drag it and drop it on top of mine maybe i have a position open in my team you can see that it doesn't have a little placeholder for a picture because this is a vacancy but i can double click to edit this text and i might want to say this position is open and the position is senior accountant notice you've probably already noticed most of these masters that we're adding have this little head and shoulders icon and these can be replaced with the actual photos of these different people i'm going to show you how you can do that a little bit later on but for the time being we're just going to leave them as they are now another master that you have here is the assistant belt so for example and i'm just going to zoom out a little bit here the ceo diane dickson she has a pa so i'm going to use the assistant belt drag it on top of diane dixon and you can see that now this person is an offshoot of diane now the assistant isn't the manager of any of these people below which is why they don't really have a relationship with these managers but they are directly connected to diane so let's replace the title here and i'm going to say pa [Music] and there we go so if i zoom out so you can get a better overall view you can see we're well on the way to creating a really nice looking organization chart now very often when a template like this is built the designer of the template will have included some shortcuts for you some time saving tools and in these organization chart templates there are a few that are useful now when drawing out this structure one of the masters that we have available is three positions so i'm going to say that carl over on the end here and let's zoom in a bit again has three people reporting into him so instead of adding these positions one at a time i could grab three positions drag and drop it onto carl and it's automatically going to add three people into my organization chart so this is a really nice time saving utility now i'm just gonna quickly jump in and add in the titles and the names for each of these people so join me back here again in a couple of seconds now a more sophisticated option is multiple shapes so i'm going to grab the multiple shapes master and i'm going to drop this onto briony barely as soon as i do that i get this pop-up window where i can make some selections so i can now choose how many shapes i want so technically how many people report into bryony well i'm going to say that bryony has five people reporting into her are these executives managers positions well i'm going to select position and click on ok and you can see now i have those five different positions added underneath bryony so a really good time saving feature now notice how now that i've done that the organization chart no longer fits on one sheet of paper now vizio does a really good job of laying out an organization chart but looking at this i could probably with a little bit of jiggery pokery wizardry i could probably try and fit this all on one page so i'm going to try a few different things in order to try and get all of this information onto one piece of paper now the first thing i could do is go up to the org chart tab and look in the layout group you can see that one option that i have there is re layout now i would recommend that if you are going to use this button you maybe use it at the end so when you finish putting together your organization chart and you know that you're not going to be adding anything more to it because once you relay this out if you then decide that you want to change it you're probably going to end up having to do it all over again anyway so i would leave this until last now in the case of this particular organization chart i've pretty much finished so i'm going to click re-layout now it did a little bit of something just there but if i scroll down i can see that it hasn't helped me with my problem of this organization chart spilling onto a second page so i need to maybe try something else this time i'm going to go back to my layout group and i'm going to try using this best fit to page option let's click i can see again it's done something let's scroll down but nope not quite i'm still spinning onto that second page another option that you have is located in the arrange group you can adjust the spacing so you can increase the spacing between the organization chart shapes or you can reduce the spacing so let me zoom out so i can see the bottom of my chart and i'm going to try and decrease the spacing now there's only so far that vizio can decrease the spacing but between your shapes and i can see that it's not really doing anything so i've pretty much hit that limit and i'm still spilling onto that second page so what else can i do here well maybe i don't necessarily have to be able to see all of brian is subordinates so if i click on briony and then back up to the arrange group i can say hide subordinates and you'll see as soon as i do that i get an icon in the bottom corner which lets me know that there are subordinates and if i want to show them again i just need to click that button but i'm going to hide these subordinates and when i do hide them of course i can fit everything onto one page however what if i do want to show those so let's show them again and let's try something else to rearrange this chart you can see at the moment my shapes are fairly concentrated in the middle of this page so what i'm going to do is i'm going to grab my name and i'm going to drag myself all the way over to the left hand side and then i'm going to grab carl and i'm going to drag him all the way over to the right hand side now what i'm going to do is draw a big selection box around all of these subordinates and i'm going to change the width of these different shapes so again up on the org chart tab i'm going to use my width plus and minus just here so let's decrease the width of these particular people i think that's good enough and then the final thing i could consider doing is selecting all of these shapes and then choosing to redo the layout so if i go up to the layout group and click the layout drop down i'm going to change this to a horizontal center layout and there we go so hopefully you can see that that now looks a lot better and i now have the organization chart fitting onto one page that's it for this lesson i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to the course in this lesson we're going to look at creating an organization chart using external data and the data that i'm going to be using is stored in an excel workbook now vizio can get data for organization charts and many other types of chart from different external sources i'm going to talk more about data and also something called shape data later on now many of the sources that you can get data from are kind of specialized for example i can get data from access databases external erp systems and also resource planning systems so to make this demonstration as simple as possible to understand i've chosen an external data source that isn't particularly specialized so we're going to be using microsoft excel now this is a relatively straightforward data source but it supports the data structures that you see in organization charts so in column a we have the name of the staff member in column b we have their role column c we have who their manager is and then column d the employee number and column e their start date now in this example we're going to be ignoring columns d and e so don't worry too much about those the only columns we're really interested in in our organization chart are these first three columns the name the role and the manager and what you'll notice is that this data is exactly the same as the data that we were using in the previous lesson when we built the organization chart manually so let's close down this file and let's load up the organization chart wizard so for this i'm going to jump back into file we're going to go to new and select organization charts i'm going to keep the symmetric units and click on create and this time we are going to use this organization chart wizard now on this first screen i have two different options i want to create my organization chart from information that's already stored in a file or database or information that i enter using the wizard so it's worth noting if you want to enter in your information manually whilst you're using the wizard you could select this second option we have all of our information stored in an excel worksheet so we're going to use the first option and click on next we now need to specify where this information is stored so what type of file the first option we have is a microsoft exchange server directory so this is normally something like outlook data so if you want to use employee email addresses things like that then you could utilize this option the third option that we have is an odbc compliant data source so that might be something like an access database or another database maybe an sql server but it's the middle option here that we're going to use a text org plus file or an excel file click on next now i need to locate the file that i want to use so the file that contains my information so let's click on browse and here's my file and click on open make sure you have the correct language selected and click on next so what basically happens here is that vizio looks at the workbook and tries to figure out what the columns mean and you can choose the columns in your data file that contains the correct information so in the first one here name i can see that vizio has correctly picked up that that essentially maps to the name column in my excel workbook now if this was incorrect i could click the drop-down and it's going to show all of the column headings from my excel spreadsheet and i could just select the correct one but in this case it's picked it up correctly it's also picked up reports to manager and that is also correct so i don't need to make any changes here now if there is a first name column in your data which there isn't in as you can also check it's picked up in the correct first name option here as well so i'm happy with how this looks let's click on next and now i can choose the columns or fields that i want to display so again on the left hand side i'm seeing my data file columns and then on the right hand side i have the fields that i'm going to display in the organization chart an excel has correctly picked up that i want to display the name field the role field provides the job title information so i want to make sure that we show that so let's click on add to move that into the displayed fields section now manager i don't actually want to show the manager because the managers are listed as separate names so they're going to display anyway i also don't want to include the employee number or the start date so i just have two displayed fields let's click on next now i have to choose the columns from my data file that i want to add to the organization shape and for this i only want the name and the role click on next at this stage i could choose to import pictures from my computer or network location so if i automatically wanted to add pictures into my organization chart and i have those stored off in a folder i could select the second option and then browse for that file now we're not going to do that at this stage so i'm just going to select don't include pictures in my organization chart and click on next in this part of the wizard i need to give vizio some rules so it says here your organization data may contain too many employees to fit on one page of your drawing you can specify how much of your organization to display on each page or you can let the wizard define each page automatically so if you want to specify it you can select this first option if you want the wizard to automatically break up your organization chart across pages then you would select the second option so let's go for this second option name at the top of the page well i want the top executive to be at the top of the page i have two other things down here i can hyperlink employee shapes across pages and also synchronize employee shapes now i'm not going to talk about this at this stage because we are going to look at this in more detail later on so i'm just going to stick with the defaults here and then click on finish and this is what vizio comes up with and looking at this i can see that it fairly accurately reflects the correct hierarchy now there is something that i can see here that isn't quite correct and so i need to go in and make a bit of a manual change so when it comes to diane's pa peter i can see that he's been placed down here on the same level as the other managers so what i can do is right click on peter and i can choose from the contextual menu change position type so i'm going to change him from position to assistant now when i do that it appears that nothing has actually happened so what i need to do here is jump up to my layout group and choose the re layout option and you can see that vizio reorganizes and corrects the chart the only thing left for me to do here is go away and save this chart with a name and then i'm pretty much done that's it for this lesson i will see you in the next one hello everyone and welcome back to the course we've made it down to exercise four and i want to start out exercise four by showing you my answer now this is a very straightforward organization chart but there are a couple of complications that might make you scratch your head now this organization chart has been created from a text file and the names of the people in this organization are the same as the ones that we've already seen the style of this organization chart is what we call a coin style so i'd like you to use that and we're not going to use an excel workbook we're using a text file so let's look at the text file which you'll find in the exercise files folder so if you take a look at this text file it's fairly straightforward the first row contains the name of the data fields so we have name role manager employee number and start date now it's not particularly apparent when you look at this text file in notepad where those tab characters are but each of these fields is separated by a tab so in between name and role we have a tab in between role and manager so on and so forth and the same in between each of the employees now when you use the organization wizard you should find that everything defaults to accepting this particular text file with these tab separators without you really having to do much at all now for this first person here diane dixon we can see that here is her name the next field along is role so ceo is her role the next field is manager now diane dixon is the ceo so essentially she doesn't have a manager so instead of having something in here like the other people do she just has another tab character so just bear that in mind when you're doing this exercise now when you're using the organization chart wizard when you get to the part where it asks you if you want to include photos or pictures make sure that you say yes it will then ask you where the photos are stored and how you want to associate the pictures with a person in the organization chart so you'll find all of the pictures that you need to use in the exercise files folder and in order to map these correctly to the fields in the organization wizard you're going to use the employee id number and that is this number here the emp number and you should see that that corresponds to the corresponding photo for that person so all you need to do is say that it's the emp number that you want to use to match the name of the file now there's one other thing to be aware of when you get to the point in the wizard and it asks you which field do you need to show on the organization chart and you specify role and name it will ask which shape data you need to carry over now you need to include the employee number in the shape data or it won't be able to match the photos so quite a lot to this exercise it's a little bit trickier than the ones that we've done in the past but i am fairly confident that you're going to be able to do this now we haven't spoken a great deal about shape data at the moment but we are going to do that soon in this course so everything will become a lot clearer but give this your best shot if you want to see my answer you'll find that in the exercise files folder if you're not a subscriber click down below to subscribe so you get notified about similar videos we upload to get the course exercise files and follow along with this video click over there and click over there to watch more videos on youtube from simon says it

Channel: Simon Sez IT

Views: 42,374

Keywords: microsoft visio, visio tutorial, visio overview, visio diagram, learn visio, visio refresher, visio, org chart, microsoft visio tutorial, visio training, how to use visio, visio 2019 tutorial, visio 2019, visio 365, how to use microsoft visio, ms visio, microsoft visio tutorial for beginners, visio online training, visio diagram examples, microsoft visio 2019, microsoft visio training courses

Id: jBlmDSWlbE8

Length: 229min 42sec (13782 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021