Visio® 2007 Bible

Chapter 4. Working with Shapes

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding shapes

• Finding shapes to use

• Selecting shapes and groups

• Positioning shapes precisely or casually

• Laying out shapes

• Moving and rotating shapes

• Undoing actions and deleting shapes

• Duplicating shapes

• Resizing and reshaping shapes

• Modifying the stacking order

• Grouping shapes

• Drawing graphics from scratch

Every drawing produced in Visio is comprised almost entirely of shapes, albeit with occasional off-the-cuff lines, curves, and text. No matter what type of diagram you want to develop, creating content is mostly a matter of dragging and dropping shapes onto drawing pages. Known as SmartShapes, these predefined shapes have built-in properties and behaviors that help you every step of the way.

As you work, you can select shapes to work on in several ways. With Visio tools, shape handles, and behaviors, you can position shapes easily—and as precisely or as casually as you want. Then, with shapes on the drawing page, other Visio tools and add-ons help you move, align, duplicate, and fine-tune those shapes. To simplify working with many related shapes, groups of shapes act as one monolithic shape, for instance, a title block that includes shapes for each type of title block data.

Visio provides hundreds of built-in shapes for dozens of different types of drawings. With so many shapes to choose from, you might wonder how you would ever find the shapes you want. In addition to categorizing shapes by placing them on stencils, the Visio Search for ...