Subtitles of the Movie

The final lesson I'd like to share with you with regard to inserting clipart or other media into a Visio 2007 drawing is that of inserting your own digital images, or digital images that you might have procured from the Internet, legally I hope, or from a friend, family member, colleague and so on. It's very easy to do. And as we'll see, when we bring in a digital image that imported object behaves like any other shape in Visio. So let me show you how this works. Suppose that we've downloaded or transferred some digital image files into our computer, or should I say onto our computer, and we now want to access those in Visio. What we'll want to do is open the Insert Menu, come down the menu about halfway to Picture, and then select From File in the sub-menu. This brings up our navigation dialog box, it's an insert picture dialog box, and will look a little bit different depending upon you're running Windows Vista as I am, or Windows XP, but at any rate, you navigate to where the file exists and either double-click it directly, or single-click it and then click Open. You'll notice that the View Filter down here is looking for all picture files, and believe me, as you can imagine, all of the Office 2007 applications support most of, if not all, of the major graphics files in use nowadays. So let's click open and there we have it. Let me zoom in a little by holding down Control and Shift and zooming in. That is yours truly, by the way. To give you a better look at my mug. There you go, and that's all well and good. So you notice that we can resize. Now as you have already learned you want to be careful when you resize. That is to say, let me undo that. You'll want to resize your imported graphics to make sure that when you do resize them they maintain their aspect ratio or their proportionality. If you want to free rotate, we can come up to our rotate shape handle and then spin those graphics all day long. All right. Now, what if we want to create a connector between those shapes. That's very easy. Why don't we begin by resizing this guy and you want to make sure that under Tools, Snap and Glue, you're allowing Glue to shape geometry as well as to connection points, and I'll show you why in just a minute. What we'll do is hold down Control and drag myself over to another section of the page and then we can select the connector tool, and you'll notice that as long as we have that Snap to Shape geometry we really don't need to add any additional connection points. We can simply click and drag until we see, you know, the ability to create a link between those shapes. That's pretty cool, isn't it? Let's go back to the pointer tool and format this line a little bit. What we can do is right-click it and change it from a right angle connector to a curved connector and we can mess with the arc and bow of that graphic to our heart's content, and then to finish we can select the connector, maybe thicken it up a little bit, maybe we can; actually why don't we go to Format, Line, and make some changes here. Let's make the pattern solid. Let's make the color something in the blue or purple category. Let's put an ending end, or an arrowhead on it, and see how that looks. That doesn't look too bad, does it? We probably want to get rid of those connection points so why don't we open View, Turn off the Grid, View, Turn off Connection Points, and you could have fun with this. We could bring this down here and, you know, you can create a greeting card in no time using imported digital images and additional shapes like this line shape. So I hope that that makes some semblance of sense and you now appreciate how easy it is to incorporate your own digital media in a Visio 2007 drawing file.