Subtitles of the Movie

Ok. Now we need to cover again what I mentioned earlier in this module is a potential gotcha for students of Visio and that lies in deleting layers. Let's say, for instance, that we wanted to delete the office accessories layer. Now, you know and I know that the office accessories layer in this diagram contains two shapes; this wastepaper basket and this plant. If we decided well, we want to simplify our layer structure here so why don't we open view, go to layer properties and decide, you know, office accessories, we don't need that layer anymore. Let's go ahead and remove it. And if we're not careful, if we've had a little bit too much coffee to drink that day, for instance, and we click yes prematurely here, we may wind up with some unintended consequences. Namely, you notice what just happened, we lost our shapes. They're gone. Now, is this an undoable action; that is to say, can we press control Z or use the undo command on the standard tool bar to bring that layer back? Yes. So there is some fallback ability. But you need to be really careful and aware of the fact that when you delete a layer, all of the shapes that are currently associated with that layer go up the flue with it. Now, how can we protect against that? Well, let's select these two annotations and then let's open format layer and see what we can do to remediate the situation. At this point, these two annotation shapes are part of just a single layer, annotations. We know that we want to get rid of the annotations layer, but we need to preserve those shapes. Remember at the beginning of this module I showed you how to create a default or active layer and I like to call mine default for ease of use. If we associate these annotation shapes with both the annotations layer and the default layer, then we shouldn't lose them if we decide that we want a new annotations. So let's do that. Let's click OK. And at this point these shapes are now associated with two layers. We'll open the view menu, come down to layer properties and then let's make sure that annotations is selected, we'll click remove. This time we won't be so hasty. We'll actually read this informational dialog box that tells us explicitly removing this layer will delete all shapes belonging to it. Remove the layer? Yes. Let's click OK and fortunately these shapes are still here and we can right click one, go to the format layer and verify that yes, they now belong to the default layer. So the take-home message here, friends, is to be aware which layer or layers your shapes belong to and just be mindful that if you delete a layer, that any shapes that are currently associated with that layer go away.