Visio Essentials
This will familiarize you with the different tools that Visio has to offer.
In order to start working with Visio you need to familiarize yourself with the different tools that Visio has to offer. In this chapter we will be discussing the main aspects of Visio like the Visio Diagramming Environment, the drawing page, stencils, the Visio Toolbars, etc.
Visio’s diagramming environment is comprised of a drawing page and a stencils pane to assist in creating drawings of specific types with much ease. A drawing page provides a region where the diagram can be assembled using components from an array of shapes called stencils. A stencil is nothing but a collection of shapes. Stencils provide a collection of related shapes, which can be simply dragged on to the diagramming page to include them in the diagram. Each type of diagram has a stencil attached to it. For Example , if you select Flowchart as the diagram, the stencil on the left will display a collection of shapes that are commonly used in Flowcharts. Similarly, if you you select an organization chart as the diagram type, a stencil will be displayed on the left with a collection of shapes that are most commonly used for Organizational Charts.
The Drawing Page on the right is where will actually create your drawing. It is like a canvas for your diagrams. The Drawing page is divided into several small squares forming a grid. This is useful to align drawing objects and scale objects.
To create a diagram, all you need to do is select and drag the the shapes you want onto the drawing page, arrange them and connect them using the connectors. We will learn about the more complex features of creating a diagram like changing the backgrounds for shapes, adding text and resizing shapes later in this tutorial.
Fig 1: Visio Diagramming Environment
