Visio® 2007 Bible

Chapter 26. Creating and Managing Scaled Drawings

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Creating new scaled drawings

• Starting from existing CAD drawings

• Starting from existing Visio scaled drawings

• Managing scaled drawings

• Managing drawing content with Visio layers

• Creating and removing layers

• Controlling content behavior with layers

• Assigning shapes to layers

Rather than a competitor to CAD programs, Visio makes a perfect complement to the one you use. Visio building plan templates are ideal for fast prototyping—dragging and dropping Visio shapes is a quick way to experiment with different layouts. When you settle on a few candidate plans, the Visio drawings and their shapes export easily into your CAD application. Visio is also helpful when you want to include drawings created in CAD applications in broader presentations. After inserting CAD drawings into Visio drawings, you can put Visio tools to use adding presentation annotation and graphics that CAD doesn't handle as easily, if at all.

For folks who don't have access to a CAD program, Visio is an adequate substitute for reviewing CAD drawings or for producing smaller plan drawings from scratch. Visio Professional stencils offer numerous shapes for a variety of building plans.

Like CAD programs, Visio provides a feature called layers to organize drawing contents. Although Visio layers differ from their CAD cousins, they control shape behavior, such as whether shapes are visible when printed or whether they are editable. For example, reference lines that you ...