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Using sample drawings with Visio 2007 is useful for a couple reasons. Number one, sample drawings show you some features to Visio that you might otherwise be unaware. Number two, sample drawings can be helpful as a sort of practice area or sandbox for you to get familiar with the Visio interface. So in this lesson I'd like to show you a couple of different sources for finding Visio sample files and what we can do with them. Both of them incidentally, come from Microsoft. The first way to get samples is by opening the Visio application and accessing the sample diagrams right from within Visio. Now, we can either be in the getting started page, like you're seeing here, or you can have a document open. It doesn't matter at all. What we need to do next is to open the help menu and select, let's see, where is it? There it is. Sample diagrams. The third choice from the top. That'll bring us to this template category called samples and we can choose one of one, two, three, four, five sample drawings. Now, let me quit out of Visio for just a minute by opening the file menu and selecting exit because I want to show you yet another way to go. I'm going to click start, run and type Visio. This is simply another way we can open the Visio application. If you're more of a keyboard person, you might be comfortable with this method. I know I am. We'll click OK. And instead of opening the help menu and selecting sample diagrams, you notice that right here in the getting started page under template categories there's samples as well. So it's up to you what you want to do. For this example let's select IT asset management sample. We'll double click it and what we're going to see here is a fairly detailed drawing. Let me bring up the zoom a little bit so you can see some more detail. And what's really nifty about this, you see I'm increasing the view here, and because my screen resolution is set kind of low, I apologize for you not seeing more of this, but this particular sample drawing is nice because it shows us how we can link external data, in this case this is tabular data from a Microsoft Excel worksheet, and how we can link that up to shapes on the drawing page. And if this looks complicated, don't worry about it too much. We're going to cover the external data topic very thoroughly in the next tutorial series and you'll understand how powerful it is and that it's really not as confusing or complicated as you might otherwise think. So in summary, one way to get to our sample diagrams is to open the help menu and select sample diagrams from there. The second place to go is the worldwide web and you should do a Google search for Visio 2003 sample diagrams. This'll bring you to the Microsoft download center and at least, as of this recording, Microsoft hasn't published sample diagrams native for Visio 2007, but that's ok. This pack here that I'm showing you includes 20 sample Visio 2003 diagrams that will open and are editable in Visio 2007. It's about a four or five megabyte file. It's a fairly small download and it is free to download. There's no cost. Once you've downloaded it, you can just double click the Visio Sam.exe installer and what you'll wind up with at the end of the day, let me double click this, is, as I mentioned, 20 documents. Now, these are VSDs, they're not VSTs. A VST file, as we'll learn later, represents a Visio template file. And we can just double click any of these. I'll click orgchart.vsd just for an example and here we have an sample organization chart that we can use for our learning or, frankly, we can just modify this one to suit our needs in business. So that's how we can get to sample diagrams from Microsoft for use in Visio 2007.