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Microsoft Visio 2007 Tutorials
Working Precisely with Visio 2007 / Setting Snap and Glue Options
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Subtitles of the Movie (Microsoft Visio 2007 / Working Precisely with Visio 2007 / Setting Snap and Glue Options)
Why don't we take a closer look at the snapping and gluing options available to us in Visio 2007? To begin, we'll open the window menu and navigate back to my other drawing, which isn't based on a particular template. It's just, well, it is, but it's using the basic shapes template rather than an architectural template and you'll notice that we have a drawing scale set. Let's quickly undo that by navigating to file, page setup, drawing scale and we'll reset the drawing scale to no scale and click OK. All well and good. I'll hold down control while I roll on my mouse wheel to bring our zoom in quite a bit, under seven percent it looks like. And now let's get down to business. We'll get down to business by opening the tools menu and selecting snap and glue. Now, we've discussed some of these options thus far. On the general tab we have currently active. Now, this is where we can globally turn on or turn off snap and glue behavior. Now, you may not want to do that, frankly, because snapping is what allows shapes to more accurately stick, for lack of a better term, to your drawing page. Glue is what allows you to link one shape to another with a connector. But if for whatever reason you wanted to disable either of those globally, simply uncheck the appropriate option. We've talked about drawing aides in a previous movie. This helps us to better create circles and squares from ellipses and rectangles, respectively by holding down control when we resize them. The snap to options are dealing strictly with snapping behavior and again, snapping deals with a shape's ability to cleave or stick a drawing page and you notice that by default an object will stick to a ruler subdivision in the grid. This makes it easy, let me click OK here, to bring out a shape and when you let go of it, it will not land between two grid boxes. In other words, I can't place this, well, I guess I can actually. It'll snap to the nearest grid intersection is what it'll do. See? And that's probably what you want by design. You want to be able to more accurately line up shapes horizontally and vertically, right? So that's how that works. Let's open the tools menu, come back down to snap and glue and you notice that you can snap to many, many things here. You can snap to shape intersections, shape handles, shape vertices and so on. Now, gluing, again, deals with what you can connect one shape to another with. And by default you can glue to guides and connection points. Let me OK out of here. Remember that these blue Xs are connection points. So let me duplicate this shape really quickly and you'll recall that we can choose the connector tool to make a connection between connector points. That's great. I'm now going to hit control Z to undo that change. The other thing deals with; let's reselect the pointer tool too, ok. Let's bring out a guide and we'll talk about guides a little bit later in this series. But you'll notice that we can bring a shape close to a guide and we get a link or a glue event happening. This is helpful in terms of being able to move and reposition a bunch of items and maintain their orientation. You see? Finally, let's come back to tools, snap and glue and see if we've missed anything. Not really. These are good default options here, just to glue to guides and connection points. But if you want more flexibility in gluing behavior, you can choose to glue anywhere on a shape, not just a connection point, but anywhere on the shape. That's the shape geometry action. You could glue actually to the resize handles or the vertices. So bottom line here is you have quite a bit of choice and if you're confused about any of these options, remember that we have online help down here in the lower left of the snap and glue dialog box and if you give that a click, it'll bring up the appropriate help screen where we can check out those options. Very helpful stuff indeed. Final point, make sure to click OK when you're finished here. If you click cancel or the close button, your changes are going to go up the flue. So be careful about that.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Microsoft Visio 2007 |
| Author: | Tim Warner |
| SKU: | 33791 |
| ISBN: | 1-934743-03-8 |
| Release Date: | 2007-09-06 |
| Duration: | 10 hrs / 152 lessons |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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