Subtitles of the Movie

Let's talk more about shapes and stencils. I know we're going to be spending a whole module on nothing but shapes, but I think here it's apprapro to show you some more tips and tricks with stencils and shapes and how the two intertwine. Number one, I want to show you how to change the view. By default, what we see here in our shapes window are stencils displayed such that all shapes give you both a mini representation of the shape, plus its title. Well, as you become more and more familiar with these shapes and stencils, you may not want to see all of that information at once. In other words, you want to conserve screen real estate, as it's called. Well, check this out. We can right click any stencil heading, come down to view and change to one of five different view types. Icons and names is the default. But if you just want icons, for instance, we can choose that. Alternatively, we can right click the stencil heading, come down to view and choose names only if we don't want to see the graphic, but rather just the descriptive name. To reset things to their default, we would right click and go view, icons and names. Now, you should notice something. Let me come over to another stencil and change its view. I will put this one at just icons only. Now, what do you think is going to happen if we select a different stencil? See? Any change you make to the view here, even though at first it appears you're making the change only to the current stencil, it actually affects all stencils in your shapes window. So be aware of that. I'm going to right click, choose view, icons and names to reset that. Now, let's open up our custom stencil again. You'll remember how we found that. We would use our shapes tool on the standard tool bar and open my shapes and you can create as many custom stencils as you want to. Now, the favorite stencil, if I bring that out, and that is just a starter or a default custom stencil, that's it. It has no special powers or abilities or anything like that so you don't need to worry about that. Now, when you bring out your favorites or your custom stencil, you have to make sure to place that stencil in read-write mode. You'll recall that when we talked about building a new stencil from scratch, initially that stencil shows up with a little red asterisk and what that means is that you can add shapes to that stencil, how we talked about before, right clicking the shape, coming to add to my shapes and then adding it to the appropriate custom stencil. The other way to do it, let me bring out another shape onto the page, is that you can copy a shape to a custom stencil by holding down control, dragging the shape into the custom stencil window and letting go of the mouse first. Now, this one is read only and if you drag a shape into a custom stencil that's marked read only, Visio asks us, this stencil is opened right now, read only. Would you like to edit the stencil so the operation can be completed? Yes, we do. So there it is. And we know that we can click twice on a shape's name to give it a new name that's a little bit more descriptive than master. Fine. There we go. Now, what is this master business? Any shape that's on a stencil is called a master and when you drag a master shape out onto the drawing page, you create an instance, a reusable instance of that master. Now, what else can we do here? Well, as long as your stencil is in read-write mode where we have the little red star, you can actually edit quite a few properties of a shape that's on a custom stencil. Now, you can only do this for custom stencils. You notice if I right click a built-in stencil, the edit stencil option is grayed out. However, if we come to our custom stencil, we can right click and toggle the read write ability of that stencil just by right clicking and choosing edit stencil. Once the stencil is read-write mode, we can right click a shape and come up to edit master and then choose either master properties, edit master shape or edit icon image. Master properties is cool because we can change not only the display name of that master, but also what happens when we hover over it; in other words, the prompt text. This is the prompt text. The default size of the icon, the master name alignment and then the search key words are really cool because when we or another person searches for shapes that match a particular description, this shape will appear in their results set if it matches one or more of these key words. So let's click OK here and then let's hover over the printer and we see our custom prompt text. Finally, to wrap this up in a tidy little bow, we'll right click the shape, come up to edit master and I'll show you the edit master shape. Bottom line here everyone is that you have ability to customize the actual shape; in other words, the look and feel of that object. It's pretty darn cool when you think about it and once you're in this view, you can just choose file, close to come back.