Subtitles of the Movie

Have you ever been burned by forgetting to save a document or similarly, not saving a document often enough? If you have been burned and suffered data loss that way that's a lesson most people have to learn only once. In this lesson, I'd like to show you how we save and open Visio documents. It's pretty straightforward if you're used to saving and opening documents in other Windows applications. Here we have an unsaved drawing. Again, we can easily tell whether a drawing has been saved or not by examining the title bar. Mine says drawing four. Looks like an IT asset diagram. That's great. How do we save it? Well, initially it doesn't really matter which save command we choose. As it happens, there are three. One is the save button on the standard tool bar and I will take this moment to let you know that if you hover over a tool bar button, you'll get what's called a screen tip that appears that in Visio, I really enjoy this actually. It gives you the keyboard shortcut for that command. And we'll see that save can also be done with control S. Incidentally, that control S works in just about every Windows application for the save function. In the file menu, we have our other save options. I guess there are three in here and not just the two that I thought there were. There's save and save as. Because this document hasn't been saved yet, it doesn't matter which of these we choose. I'll just choose save. We're given, ironically or not, a dialog box called save as and the specific look and feel of this is going to be a little bit different, depending upon whether you're running Windows Vista or Windows XP. This is the Vista dialog box. In XP, up here where my mouse is, we'll be able to open what's called the look-in drop down and then choose a different drive or a folder. It works a little bit differently in Windows Vista. So I would just defer to your expertise with your operating system for that step. But saving a Visio document involves two things; one, navigating to where in the file system, either on the local computer or your local area network you want to save the file and number two, what you're name is. So in this case, I've used the favorite links area over here on the left in my Vista save as box. And I'm selecting the desktop. This is where I'm going to save this document. We'll see that we have a space for a file name and you want to click in there. Make sure that what's in there currently, the default name is gone. You can select it and press backspace to get rid of it and then use your long file name capability of Windows. You have 255 characters to work with. I'll call this IT asset drawing. Now, I've been asked by a lot of students, do we need to add the extension, the dot vsd? No, we don't. It's great if you add it, but you don't have to because underneath file name it says save as type drawing. And Visio will automatically append the appropriate extension. If we open next to tools here, the save button, you notice that there's two things we can do; a straight save or a read-only save. Well, we want this file to be read write, so we'll just click save to complete the process. Now let's quit out of Visio and learn about opening files. Well, your computer's going to automatically associate the dot vsd extension with a Visio drawing. So you should just be able to use my computer or Windows Explorer, browse to the file and double click it to open the file in Microsoft Visio. Easy as can be, right? Well, let me close this window now and let's open a document from within Visio. Those are really the two ways to open a file; one, finding the file icon and double clicking it, two, coming within the application and using the open command. Now again, we can look to the tool bar. The standard tool bar contains the open command, also mapped to control O on the keyboard. The open icon looks like a folder with an arrow coming out of it. Alternatively, we can open the file menu and select open that way. Again, we're given a dialog box that looks almost identical to the dialog box that we saw with save, save as. We're asked to do the same thing as before; namely use our navigational controls to locate the file. In this case we know my file is on the desktop. And then we can either single click the file to select it and then click open, or just simply double click the file to immediately launch that file. No muss, no fuss, no greasy aftertaste, right? Let's close this window and I want to show you one more thing. In the file menu, we have what's called the MRU list, also called the most-recently used. You'll see down at the bottom here. This is a nice, easy way to open up the files. And you notice I've got nine displayed. You can customize your MRU list; that is to say how many files show up there by opening tools in Visio, coming down to the very end, options, and then, let's see, probably on save open, right? I'll be darned. It looks like it's not here. Now, in some Office applications. Oh, there it is. On the general tab we have recently-used file list. And nine is actually the top choice there. So you can increase or decrease that however you want to.