Subtitles of the Movie

Well, let's talk about menus and tool bars, shall we? We're in Visio right now and, as I mentioned in an earlier movie, the top-most user interface element, besides the very top here, what's called the title bar, is the menu bar. And the menu bar is the main anchor point from which we choose our commands in Visio. Frankly, as you know if you've used other Windows programs, just about any program I've ever used also includes a menu bar. Now, some things to note about the menu structure; some of the options are always there. For instance file, edit, view, insert, format, tools, data, window and help. Others will appear on an ad-hoc basis, depending upon your template. For instance, right now I've opened up a sample file called orgchart.vsd and because I'm using the organization chart object, whenever we do that we receive an extra menu here, in this case called organization chart. So that's fine. What else to note about menus? Well, you'll notice that the menu structure has one letter underlined in each word. That's for those of us who are into the keyboard. What this means is you can use the alt key on your keyboard, along with the underlined letter, to fire that menu. For instance, to open the file menu, we can hit alt F. And you'll notice that every command in the menu is similarly underlined, such that we could do an alt T to open the tools menu and then select R to choose the ruler and grid dialog box. So the bottom line is you aren't fully constrained to using a mouse. What else do we have? Well, as I mentioned in the previous lesson, our two standard tool bars in Visio 2007 are the standard tool bar, right up here, and then right below it the formatting tool bar. Now, don't worry a bit if you accidentally close a tool bar. That's one of the great fears that many of my beginning students have. They're literally afraid to click something for fear that they'll make a user interface element go away and they won't be able to bring it back. It's not a big deal at all. All we have to remember is the view menu is where we go to view or hide user interface elements. In particular, a little before half-way down the view menu, you'll see tool bars. This fly-out gives us a list, alphabetized list, of all available tool bars in Visio. To bring out an extra one, simply give it a click. You see? Another way to access our tool bars is to right click any existing tool bar button. Now, notice that this will only work by right clicking either the menu bar or a currently open tool bar button. If we right click down in the drawing page, for instance, we'll see another set of options. That's why the right click produces what's called a context-sensitive menu, or also called a shortcut menu. So anyway, if we want to hide a tool bar, we can just right click in there and then deselect the appropriate tool bar. Ok? So there's two ways to go; right clicking an existing tool bar button or opening the view menu. Now, again, I've helped several students with this who may have inadvertently right clicked and inadvertently turned off all of their tool bars. They come to me, Tim, what do I do? Will I ever get my tool bars back? The answer to that, of course, is yes. Remember our view menu where we make things visible or we hide things. Come down to tool bars; slide on over and up to standard. Bring that back and then at this point we can right click a tool bar button on that standard tool bar to re-invoke the formatting menu. So that's really it as far as the basics of menus and tool bars are concerned. Final note: I've mentioned this before but I'll say it again. If you hover your mouse over a tool bar button, what'll happen after a very short period of time is you'll see what's called a screen tip show up and what's nice about the screen tip is it will give you the name of the tool and also the relevant keyboard shortcuts. So here it says that to do a print preview, we would hit control F2. And why don't I do that right now? There we are. We've been immediately taken or transported into print preview mode. So we'll click close and return to our drawing workspace.