Subtitles of the Movie

It's often necessary when doing drawings to align shapes relative to one another, and Visio provides tools for assisting with that. So let's drag some shapes onto the page now, and have a go at doing it. Right, so I have three shapes there, ready to go. And let's say we want to align them all on the horizontal plane, so what we can do is select them. Now the order of selection is important, because alignment will be relative to the first shape selected. So let's say I want to align along this plane here, with this particular shape as a reference. So I select that shape there and then holding down shift, I can select the other two shapes. You can see that's the first one because of the green color here, and these are the subsequent shapes with the aqua color. Now to access the align shape function, we can go up to the Shape menu, and press Align Shape and the align shape dialog box appears. The other option, if I cancel out of that is to bring up the Action tool bar, and then on here we also have an Align Shape button. Pressing on that button brings up the same dialog box, or we can click the dropdown list and select the option we require from there. But, we will need dialog box for now, it's a little easier to see. So we have a number of options for alignment, this is what we wanted to do first, align in the up and down direction. We can either align on the shape centers, align all the bottoms or align the tops. So let me align to the tops, and click ok. And you can see now how all those tops are aligned there. Just undoing that, if we go back in here again, we can try a left to right alignment. So let's say we align on the centers. If we want to clear a selection at any time, we can click these crosses, and that clears our selection. Clicking OK, we are now aligned along the center there. We can also do both at once, and let's have a look at the effect of that. If we click there and there and OK, you will see they are all aligned on top of one another. Now you might have noticed in that dialog box there's a further option available. If we make a selection say to align through the centers, we can elect by ticking here to 'create guide and glue shapes to it'. So this creates a guide as we have seen in the previous movie, and let's just try out and see. So they have all been aligned again to that center shape, but now all the shapes are glued to a guide. And we can then select the guide, click and drag, and move all the shapes simultaneously. Undoing those, if we go back once more, let's try that in the vertical direction, same situation. Or if we do both at once, you will see here that a guide point is created in the center there. The next thing we might want to do is distribute the shapes evenly on the page. So let's just, I will just make the distribution a little less even so that (the) change can be more easily seen. Now if I select all those shapes now, in this case the order of selection is not important, but we want to distribute these evenly. [00:04:32.0 So you can see how that gap there is small, that one is large, here we have got a large gap, here we have got a small gap - we can even all those up automatically by using Visio's distribution feature. And again we could go up to the Shape menu and select Distribute Shapes to access the distribute shapes dialog box. Or otherwise we can select it from clicking that button here, and there's also the option of a dropdown list there. Now be careful with that dropdown, because you have only four choices there, you are missing two of the available on the dialog box - viz. the align with equal spacing choices. So let's try this out, if we want to align left to right with equal spacing, as its got there, we just click ok and you can see now this shape has moved across, and we have a spacing there. Or we can align in the vertical direction in a similar way, and there we have it there. Undoing it to put it back. The other options in that dialog box you can see are to do with aligning all the left side equidistant or all the right sides or all the centers, all the tops, the bottoms, or the centers in the up and down direction as well. There's also an option here to create guides and glue shapes to them in a similar way we did with the alignment choice, so let's try that out. We are going to create guides, and align in the left-to-right direction. And there we have it, so each of those shapes is centered on its own guide. And everything is selected there at the moment - so you will see that they all move in tandem and the distribution is kept the same. If we want to widen those out, or narrow them down, we can click to clear the selection, and click one of the two outside guides. And you will notice as I drag one away and let go, this one also moves - so the spacing there is maintained the same. And we can also do the same on this one of course. Whereas the center one shown in red, we are not able to move that one. Similarly we can do that in the other direction. I select there, select up/down, create guides, we can have them going in both directions simultaneously. Those ones can be moved out, but the center one is locked in place. So that concludes our look at relative alignment in Visio. Let's just clear the page of all those guides. The easiest way to do that is to go up to the Edit menu and click Select All, and then hit the delete key, and that gets us back to a clean page once more. So in the next chapter now, we will be looking at different ways to customize Visio.