Subtitles of the Movie

Probably the second most popular and unfortunate oops that my students experience with Visio or in any Windows application besides not saving often enough is either an ignorance of or a undisciplined use of the undo and redo commands. So in this lesson I'm going to ensure that you're fully specked up on how to use these tools. And by the way, because undo and redo is used in just about every Windows application, you can leverage this skill all over the place, not just within Visio. Now then we're in Visio here in the getting started with Microsoft Office Visio splash screen and we'll begin by opening a recent document. One thing we haven't mentioned thus far is on the getting started screen, as long as we have the getting started node selected in the template categories area, we will see recent templates that we've use in the middle and then on the right a scrolling list of recent documents that we've opened. So please be aware of this getting started template category. It's very helpful. So let's open up our IT asset drawing. I'll just double click it and after a moment pause there it appears. I'm now going to open the zoom command on the standard tool bar, bring that up a little bit. Actually, why don't I back that up to 75 percent so we can see what we're doing here? And let's say that we select a shape and press delete. Woops! We didn't want that to happen. How can we bring it back? Well, I just did. How did I do that? Well, let me delete the shape once and show you. It's the good, old undo command. We'll see it here on the standard tool bar and you notice that once you've undone your first action, it grays out. But as you undertake action after action, the undo command actually keeps a record of each change you make to the currently active document. That's what this drop-down arrow is used for. If we open it up, we see that we've dropped on page, that's adding the server icon over here, and then we've executed deletes. Now, you notice how this works. We can either do an undo stepwise, one step at a time, or we could roll back several steps simultaneously. Ok? So again, let me recreate what I've done. Let me do a couple deletes here. Let me bring out a server icon. That is to say if you want to roll back multiple actions, you can't just select the second choice back. You'll notice that I'm undoing multiple actions at once. So if I had, let's say, 15 or 20 actions recorded, I couldn't just selectively bring back the eighth change I made. So be aware of that. Now, what you'll also notice besides the undo command is what's not on the standard tool bar and that's called the redo command. Please note that you get to these commands in the edit menu. If you open up edit, our first two options here are undo and redo. The keyboard shortcuts that you'll want to know are control Z for undo and control Y for redo. So let me undo a step and then let me open the edit menu and we now can redo that last undo. Yes, I know that it gets kind of philosophical and metaphysical with all this undo and redo, but I hope you're following me. Another thing to keep in mind about the undo and redo commands is that buffer exists only while you're in that document. Be careful you don't close the document too soon because as soon as you close the document, the undo-redo buffer is purged. Another important note is where we can tweak how many changes Visio will track in its undo-redo buffer. We can open the tools menu and select options to bring the options dialog box up and if we navigate to the general tab, we'll see under general options undo levels. Twenty is the default. Let's see how high we can crank this up. Looks like 99 is the maximum number of undo levels. Be aware that the more changes that you're tracking in Visio, the more of a footprint you're putting on the system. That is to say you're probably going to slow down the performance of your computer just a little bit by cranking this up too high. I'm going to reset this to 20 and then we'll click OK. So that's how undo and redo works. You can either use the undo button and, of course, we can customize the standard tool bar to bring out the redo if we do want it there all the time. Alternatively, we can open the edit menu to select undo or redo or we could use the control Z or control Y keyboard shortcuts respectively.