We often provide hints, tips and “how to…” articles about the
mainstream components of Microsoft’s Office suite of products. However, we
rarely stray into some of the other components of the suite – Powerpoint,
Access, Frontpage and Visio. This month, we provide a very brief introduction
to Visio which we hope you will find informative, and perhaps encourage you to
look closer at what is an excellent product.
Visio is a graphical drawing program that uses pre-defined
shapes that can each be manipulated in many ways (enlarged, reduced, distorted
in any direction etc.). Some of the pre-defined shapes are 2-dimensional, with
others being 3-dimensional in nature. Each shape, and a plethora of different
“connectors” has “smart connection points that can be made to “snap” to each
other and “glued” in that position if you so wish.
You can therefore construct complex shapes and diagrams and
move elements around, with the connectors remaining attached to the components
of the shape. Any number of components within a created shape can also be
“grouped” and moved or modified as a single shape, and then “ungrouped” when
appropriate.
When first launching Visio, you are asked to define the category
of drawing you wish to create. You can then select one of a number of
sub-categories – see example screen-shot below (showing different types of
Business Process sub-categories):
This process results in the setting up of the workspace with
the default set of templates (each one containing many pre-defined shapes
relating to the selected type of drawing).
The top-level of categories include the following:
Block diagram Map
Brainstorming Mechanical
Engineering
Building plan Networking
Business Process Organisation
Chart
Charts and Graphs Process
Engineering
Database Project
Schedule
Electrical Engineering
Software
Flowchart Web
Diagram
The initial basic drawing page is blank, but with a
pre-defined grid that is used to line up components of the drawing on the
page. This grid can be re-sized or switched off if you so wish. Whether
shapes are forced to “snap” to the grid can also be turned on or off.
Before beginning the drawing, you can specify the page size
(this normally defaults to A4), margin sizes and any scaling (default is 100%).
Creating the basic drawing involves selecting appropriate
shapes and connectors from the available templates and dragging and dropping
them on to the page. They can then be enlarged or re-positioned at will. Place-holders
for text labels are provided for each shape.
As with other, more complex drawing packages, a drawing can
consist of a number of “layers”, each one laid on top of the others. This
allows you to assign certain shapes to a specific layer. For example, if you
are creating a building plan, you can assign the building structure to one
layer, the electrical and plumbing detail to a separate layer, and furniture to
a third layer. You can then edit, view or print layers separately.
Some of the more advanced features of Visio include the
ability to:
·
Create organisation charts automatically from a database of names
and titles (stored for example in an Excel spreadsheet)
·
Create a logical diagram from an existing web site, by analysing
the structure of the site.
·
Create a logical diagram of a computer database by using a
similar technique, or alternatively create a database from a logical diagram
previously created in Visio.
There are also a myriad of customised shapes, templates and
other sources of information at various locations on the Internet. Some of
these shapes and templates are free, whereas other, more complex ones are only
available from the creator at a cost.
This is, of necessity a very brief introduction into the
wealth of features available in this excellent software component of Office.
If you require more in-depth knowledge of Visio, please contact Alan Finch on
01224-697457 who can provide more help.
