Subtitles of the Movie

For many users of the Microsoft Office applications, the notion of entering a page setup dialog box probably leads these folks to think, ok, this is where I set my page size, paper type, my page orientation and so forth. And that's certainly true. However, Visio gives us a tremendous amount of additional options in the page setup dialog box as you finish out a document and prepare it either for electronic use or on-screen use or alternatively, to print that drawing out on paper. So let's take a look at the page setup dialog box and see what options are available there. We can get to page setup by opening the file menu, coming down about half way and selecting page setup. You'll recall that whenever we see a command with the ellipses, or three dots after the command name, this tells us that we'll be asked for additional input, as opposed to just having the application execute the command with no further pause. So we'll select page setup and here we go. The page setup dialog box, at first looks kind of complex because after all, we have one, two, three, four, five, six tabs of information. Let's just briefly look at them one at a time. The print setup page is a fairly traditional option for page setup; namely we can select the type of paper that we're going to print this document on. The default is standard 8.5 x 11, but this is going to be somewhat dependent upon the template that you've selected for your drawing. We can also adjust portrait versus landscape, and you see some really nice preview information over here that shows us the relation between the drawing page and how it's set up vis-ˆ-vis your printer paper. So in this case, this particular drawing let me move this window out of the way, we would be much better served by using a landscape orientation. Now, we can also adjust print zoom. If you need to make the drawing on the page smaller or larger, if you want to print out a wallet-sized reproduction of a schematic diagram and use that as you walk around a building and so on and so forth, you can adjust the zoom there from 100 percent up or 100 percent down. Alternatively, for especially large drawings that span several pages, you can force the scale to fit a certain number of sheets across, vis-ˆ-vis sheets down. Finally we have the notion of printing grid lines. That may be helpful for something like a business diagram or an office layout diagram where you've got some architectural scale that you need to maintain. The page size tab in the page setup dialog box allows us to just configure what's going on with the drawing page. You could either set that to be the same as the printer paper size or you can make an adjustment here. Drawing scale we'll talk about in much greater detail a little bit later in the course. The default is to have a one-to-one relationship between what you see on your page and what's printed; in other words, there's no scale. But again, if you're doing an architectural drawing, building diagram and so forth, you may need, say, one-eighth inch on the printed page to be equivalent to one foot in your drawing page, if that makes sense. I hope it does. And depending upon what scale you use down here, this'll give you your overall page size in measurement units. The page properties tab is useful for assigning background images to pages and also establishing the default measurement units for that page. Again, we'll talk more about all of these later. Layout and routing gives us our document-wide defaults regarding how connectors are routed between shapes and also how line jumps are handled if you have criss-crossing connectors in a single drawing. And then finally on shadows, you can establish defaults for shadow formatting on shapes. For instance, we have, in this template, the number two style, offset lower right. So if we apply a shadow format to a, let's say a rectangle, this is what the shadow is going to do by default. You see we have full customization ability down here. Now, I'll finish this up by giving you another newcomer mistake and I hope that you can avoid this. Let's say we make some changes here. Like, let's say we use three, offset lower left and we say, ok, we've made our change. We're done. Let's close and we click the X. You may be unpleasantly surprised to come to page setup and realize that your change hasn't been retained. Make sure that if you do a change, and this goes for any dialog box, that you click either apply, which makes your change go into effect and keeps the dialog box open, or click OK. Clicking cancel and the close button are equivalent actions. Of course, you could click apply and then click the close button, but I'm just talking about what you would do initially.