Visio® 2007 Bible

Chapter 7. Enhancing Diagram Appearance with Formatting

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Fast formatting with themes

• Working with colors

• Formatting consistently with styles

• Applying line, text, and fill formats

• Creating bulleted and numbered lists

• Formatting shapes

These days, most audiences want both information and good looks—from TV news anchors to the Visio diagrams in presentations. Formatting can make the difference between dreary drawings that go unread and documents that make everyone take notice. Visio 2007 has taken some giant steps in making diagrams look good and communicate clearly with a minimum of effort on your part.

One new feature, Themes, can format an entire drawing with consistent and good-looking formatting in about the same number of clicks it took to open a Format dialog box in Visio 2003. Visio comes with predefined Theme Colors and Theme Effects, which are amalgamations of the formatting tools you know and love—line styles, fill styles, text formatting, and shadows. Visio themes are designed by professionals to look good, which is particularly helpful if you have to ask your spouse whether your clothes match.

For additional formatting, such as emphasizing shapes, you can use predefined styles, similar in function to the ones in Microsoft Word, to format lines, text, and fill. If a few shapes need even more detailed tweaking, such as those with large amounts of text, you can apply unique formatting to shapes, lines, or text blocks.

This chapter covers the Visio formatting features ...