Subtitles of the Movie

In an earlier lesson, I showed you how we can apply an easy theme or change of color and style to a diagram that involves many geometric figures and text boxes. You'll recall that that was in the format menu under theme. I want to show you another way to cut some corners in terms of formatting or laying out shapes on a diagram and that is in the shapes menu. Pardon me, the shape menu. We have a command called configure layout. See how that works? We'll select it and we'll see the configure layout dialog box up here and first of all, you'll notice, let me move this out of the way, we have in our drawing page here a marketing plan that looks like it's laid out pretty well anyway. So I'm not sure how much Visio's going to be able to help us. If anything, in my practical experience, I've found the configure layout to be helpful not so much to give me a final orientation of my shapes, but at least to help me get thinking of different ways to layout the shapes more optimally on a drawing page. So what do we have here? Well, we have two sections. We have a placement section where we can select a style for our shapes, you see radial and you notice that as you select these, you see in the preview window approximately what it's going to look like. Circular and so forth. And the other option besides placement deals with your connectors. What kind of connector type are you going to use? Tree, flow chart, straight, center to center, right angle, and again, you'll see some of that update in the little preview drawing here. Now, how can we try to fix this? Well, why don't we choose circular, just for grins, and see how that works. And let's choose flow chart, curved for our connectors. We click apply and then move this configure layout out of the way. I'm not sure if that's much better than it was before. It certainly impacts this title block here. So that's what I meant by don't count on the configure layout dialog box to be a be all end all, but it can help you in terms of getting you situated in a new way of thinking regarding laying out your shapes. We have compact tree and there's lots of different options here; right then up, right then down and so forth. We click apply, this gives us sort of a lower-left to upper-right flow to our diagram. That's not so bad, actually. So that's really it. It's a question of playing around with placement and connector styles and I would recommend strongly that when you make a change here, use the apply buttons so you can keep the configure layout dialog box up and if you don't like what you see, you can cancel out and remember, as long as you don't close the file, you can open the undo dialog. Now, I just noticed here that it considered all of those changes within the shape dialog box to be just a single change, so one stroke of the undo command brought us back to our original orientation. That's probably good news for most of you. So, any way, to recap, that's in the shape menu and it's in the configure layout command. While we're here I do want to let you know that there's a center drawing command that's really nice. If you choose center drawing, that will take everything you have on the current drawing page and in an extremely mathematically-precise way, center everything based on dead-center horizontal, dead-center vertical. So again, that's shape, center drawings.