Microsoft Visio 2013 Part B

This is the 2nd installment in my blog post series on Visio 2013 based on what I learn from the video training course by VTC on this software. In this post we are going to look at shapes and text. You can align a shape with a certain position on the screen with the dynamic grid. You can also align a shape with another shape by dragging one of the points on the ruler to line up with the shape you are aligning to. By default when you align 2 shape a set distance from each other, the 3rd shape can be aligned the same distance from one of the shapes by a marker that appears when it is at the right distance. Right clicking a shape brings up a menu of common commands like cut and copy. Control + d duplicates a shape and does so without the need for the paste command. You simply drag and drop it. The pointer tool places connection points on the lines of a shape that can have a line connected to. If you glue the line to the point the line becomes dynamic moving with the shape. If you don’t the line becomes static staying in one place even if the shape is moved. You can add text to a shape by simply single clicking the shape and typing text. If you double click it, it does the same but enlarges the shape so you can see what you are righting. The insert/ text box command inserts a holder for the text in the shape you select. The escape key gets you out of text edit mode. Insert/ line changes the line colour of the selected line and insert/ fill changes the fill colour of the selected shape. The home/ connector command adds a connector to a point. You hit escape to return to normal mode. Otherwise it keeps adding connectors. The command home/ pointer can be used to reposition text. Under home are also paragraph and text editing options. They are similar to in programs like word. You can drag and adjust the size of a text block with the mouse. The command home/ group objects groups several selected objects so they become as one. If you click insert/ online pictures there is various clip art and photos etc. Photos once inserted can be formatted like shapes. Under format are the formatting options like brightness and line weight that can be applied to a shape. You can use insert/ screen tip to customize a screen tip which appears when you hover over something with the mouse. There are some screen tips that appear by default and if you go into the screen tip command and delete the text in the screen tip text box it will delete the screen tip. If you go into the settings under file you can also turn screen tips on and off.