Subtitles of the Movie

Why don't we spend some time touring the Visio 2007 interface and just getting comfortable with it? You'll remember that the program is installed, at least, should I say a shortcut to that program is installed in your start menu in the programs group in the Microsoft Office program subgroup. And there it is; Microsoft Office Visio 2007. So if we want to launch that, what you'll see is this getting starting with Microsoft Office Visio welcome screen. And this is a really nice interface, not only for the beginner but also for the intermediate or expert user because it's an easy way to access your Visio templates. You'll notice that we have three panes here in the getting started screen. On the left we have our template categories and you'll see that depending upon the edition of Visio you're running, you'll have more or less of these categories. Once you select a category, why don't I select business, the view will change somewhat and you'll see in the middle pane the specific templates that go with that chosen category. For business, for instance, we can bring in a pivot diagram, an audit diagram, a basic flow chart, a chart or graph, cross-functional flow chart and so forth and then over in the right pane we can select one measurement unit or another and then click create to build a new drawing based upon that template. So in this example, I'm going to select the general template category and we'll select the basic diagram template. Now, to create a new drawing off of a template, we can either double click the template icon or, as I said earlier, on the right-hand side here, we can choose our measurement units and then click create. Whatever you're most comfortable with. Ultimately, though, you're brought into a blank drawing. It's unsaved. We can see at the very top of the window here what's called the title bar and by default, an unsaved drawing will be named drawing one, drawing two and so forth. To the left of the title we have what's called the control menu that just has basic window management controls. Those control menu options are replicated in the upper right with minimize, restore or maximize, depending upon how many times you click it. If you click it once, it makes the window smaller. Click it again, it maximizes the window. And finally the red X closes the entire application. Beginners to Visio often get these two close buttons confused. You do need to know that the larger set of control buttons manages the entire Visio application. The second set, the smaller set of control buttons modifies the currently open document. For instance, we can click minimize here and notice that that just simply minimizes the document. I'm going to restore that now. If we click minimize in the title bar, that minimizes the entire Visio application. So that's how that works. Beneath the title bar we have what's called the menu bar and, of course, we have different menus. The good news is that most Windows applications give you pretty standard menu names; file, edit, view, insert, format and so forth, particularly the last menu in most Windows applications is called the help menu. We'll be choosing quite a few commands from these menus as we proceed through the series. We get two tool bars by default in Microsoft Visio. One stacked right above the other. If we right click either of those tool bars, we'll get a list of all available tool bars and we can see that the two that are currently exposed are called the standard tool bar and the formatting tool bar. This top one is called the standard tool bar and it has basically standard commands. New, open, save, print, spell check, cut, copy, paste, undo, redo, it gives us access to our main drawing controls. The formatting tool bar allows us to put markup, or change the look and feel of shapes, text, so on and so forth. In the left here we have our shapes window and see the X? We'll talk more about this later. You can close this or, if we come to the split bar, we can resize it if we want to. The shapes window is important because it gives us access to all of our stencils and shapes. The largest part of the Visio interface is called the drawing page and what looks to be like a piece of graph paper is the drawing page proper. Of course, this is where our drawing exists. What you see around the drawing page is called the paste board. What's nice about the paste board is that you can use it as a staging area to put shapes and objects that you don't want to use right now. Another note about the paste board; anything you have over here in the paste board does not get printed in the final document. Let me see, have I missed anything? I don't think so. Those are the major elements. We'll be talking about several aspects of this interface as we work through the course and you'll become increasingly familiar with it. Practice makes progress, as they say.