Subtitles of the Movie

Another set of important user interface elements in Visio 2007, it seems to me, are the task bar and the view windows. Now, what are those? Well, first of all, if you've been using Microsoft Office since the XP version, then you're already familiar with the task pane motif. Now, how do we get to the task pane? Again, we use the view menu. Think about these menu options logically. If, for instance, we want to open a file, think of the word file and that should take you to the correct menu. These view options all deal with showing or hiding user interface elements or sub-windows; therefore we find all of these in the view menu. About one-third of the way down the view menu, we have the task pane command. Control F1 is the appropriate shortcut. Now, the task pane is a docked area that appears by default on the right side of your user interface and it's just kind of a catch-all bucket for a variety of features within the application. What we can do is use this big black arrow. Give that a click and we'll see a list of all available task panes. We'll discuss most of these, if not all of them, as we proceed through the series. You'll see options for changing the color theme of the current drawing. There's a data graphics options if you have linked data in a drawing. We have reviewing for using the markup tracking feature. Clip art is probably the most widely used task pane in Visio, in my opinion. We'll discuss that in great detail later. And then there's research, document management, ways to hook Visio into, say, a shared-point web portal and so on and so forth. To close the task pane we can simply use the close command or we can reopen the view menu and select task pane. This is actually a toggle command. Next let's open the view menu and see what else we have. One, two, three, four, five, six. We have six view windows to choose from and what's probably the most popular one, again in my opinion, as a Visio educator, is the shapes window. Now then, you may recall, let me come to the split bar here and drag this on over to make the shapes window larger, you may recall that the shapes window is our storing house for all of our stencils and shapes which comprise most Visio drawings. And again, I've helped many students who have an eagerness or whatever come over to the close button, given that a click and then realized oh no, I need my shapes window back. How can I get it? Well, please, don't ever worry about that. I want to empower you to feel confident that if you inadvertently close a user interface element in Vision, that you can easily bring it back. And we can do that by opening the view menu and selecting the very first option; shapes window. See? It's just as easy as that. What else do we have in the view menu? There's the pan and zoom window. We'll discuss this in much greater detail later. For now, all I'll say is that you can create a little spectacle-type object that is awfully useful for honing in and zooming in on very complex diagrams. What we're looking at right now is a fluid power schematic diagram and, as you can see, it's highly complex. The pan and zoom window is helpful in that regard. Close that out. Come back to the view menu. We have the shape data window, the size and position window, the drawing explorer window and the external data. Again we'll learn about all of these as we proceed through the series. The final one I'll show you right here, just in closing, is the size and position window. This is awfully helpful because what you can do, why don't I open the zoom and back this up a little bit, is we can select any shape on the page and the size and position window gives us the precise coordinates and measurement units for that shape on the page. Very helpful indeed. Now, all these windows are dockable and undockable. You notice that we can just smoosh a window against the ruler and we can just come to the title bar until we see our four-headed arrow, click and hold the left mouse button and drag it out into the work area and let go. So you can dock these wherever you're most comfortable placing them. You see how that works? And then we can scrunch this over here to give us more room to work with. If you don't want to see a window, simply click the close button. You can always bring it back by opening the view menu and selecting the appropriate window from that menu.