Visio® 2007 For Dummies®

Chapter 10. Layering Your Drawings

In This Chapter

• Discovering what layers are and why you might want to use them

• Creating, removing, renaming, and hiding layers

• Assigning (and reassigning) shapes to layers

• Creating layers on background pages

• Protecting shapes on a layer from changes

• Changing the color of shapes on a layer

• Printing layers — only the ones you want

• Using Snap and Glue with layers

Visio defines a layer as a named category of shapes. Think of the layer as a surface on which you can place shapes that's separate from other surfaces on a page of a diagram. When you were a child, did you ever have one of those anatomy books with the transparent sheets? The bottom sheet had the skeletal structure, the next sheet had internal organs, and then you added the nervous system, the muscular structure, and finally the skin. Well, the layer system in Visio works in much the same way. You can create layers in a Visio drawing for the same purpose as your anatomy book: to show groups or categories of shapes independently of others or as part of the whole. Many other graphics applications, such as Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro, include the concept of layers, so this isn't a Visio‐specific convention.

How can you use layers? In a landscape drawing, you may want to include structural walls and pathways on one layer; grass, ground cover, and small shrubs on another; trees on a separate layer; and ornamental flowers on another layer. Another example is a layout for a building or home in which the walls, ...