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Let's talk about creating a new diagram or new drawing in Visio 2007. Incidentally, those two terms are largely synonymous. You'll find in the literature both at Microsoft.com and at third-party sites that some folks refer to Visio documents as drawings, others refer to them as diagrams. So I'll use both terms interchangeably. So how do we create a new drawing or a new diagram in Visio? Well, when you launch the Visio application, we're given this getting started with splash screen and as I mentioned in another video, it's easier or it's intended to be an easier way for you to access your templates. So the first question is, what kind of document do you need? And again, practice makes progress. You just at least initially should spend some time clicking through each of these template categories to get a good picture of the kinds of things that they are. The first thing you should understand, that a template is simply a boilerplate, kind of like a rubber stamp in a sense. It's actually a Visio document that's saved with a different extension and a template simply offers you a preconfigured set of stencils and shapes, a preconfigured drawing scale and just preconfigured drawing page layout, page setup options and so on and so forth. That's all a template is. It's a saved collection of settings and they're optimized for particular functions. So for instance in the network template category, if I scroll in the middle area here, we have basic network diagram, detailed network diagram and so forth and you can expect rightly that if we choose to build a new document off of one of these templates, we should have stencils at our disposal that offer us those types of shapes. Similarly, if we click, say, maps and floor plans, we'll be able to create a new document intended for mapping and building layout plans. Directional map, 3-D for instance, electrical schematic diagrams, a formal floor plan, and sure enough, in a floor plan template, you'll find that the drawing scale has been preset for you. Of course, you can override all of those defaults and you'll have stencils there ready and waiting for you. In fact, why don't we choose this, just as our example? Again, to choose a new document template, we just either double click the icon in the middle pane or we can choose our measurement units on the right and click create. So here we are. Now, how can we tell that this is a special kind of a template? Well, two ways, really. First, if we take a look at the ruler over here in the drawing page area, you'll see that the scale is set much differently from, say, a black diagram, which gives you an actual, honest to goodness ruler where you see 8.5 inches across the top and 11 inches on the Y axis. Here we're seeing measurements given in feet. Again, this is the idea of the drawing scale. In the shapes window over on the left, look at the stencils. Building core, dimensioning, architectural, drawing shapes. So again, the principle of the template; you get a bucket load of relevant shapes that Microsoft feels will benefit that type of drawing in Visio. Of course, we have full creative control over these shapes. I will show you how to search for shapes, create your own stencils, open and close additional stencils, what have you. You'll become a stencil master. But in the meantime, why don't we close this document without saving. Remember, we need the inner close window button. And when we do that, we're left with kind of an empty shell here in Visio. How do we get back to our getting started? How do we select another template? Do we have to close Visio and reopen it? The answer to that, of course, is no. We select the file menu, new and check it out. Getting started. That brings us back to our getting started window. We'll also notice that the getting started window has a close button of its own. So if we give that a click, again, we're left with an empty shell. So many different ways to create a new document. We see on the standard tool bar we can click new or we can open up the drop-down list box and look here. Getting started and then here are our template categories. The third and final way is from the file menu. You can select new once again and we see all of those same options plus more. We see the getting started option, we see new drawing US units, new drawing metric, new drawing from template, or we can just drill right in to our preconfigured template categories. So if we choose new drawing US units, that's going to be your bare bones document. If you know you want to create a Visio drawing from scratch and you need no additional help, that's the option that you'd select. And point of fact, if we look over here in our shapes window, we see that there are no stencils loaded. So at this point you should be pretty well equipped to create a new document in Visio 2007.