Subtitles of the Movie

When your Visio drawings begin to get robust and complicated, invariably you'll wish for just a single tree view of all aspects of your drawing from which you can make global changes or just gain information from. Well, that's the purpose of the drawing explorer feature in Visio. Let me show you how that works now. What we're looking at here is a simple network drawing. This is from the Microsoft Visio sample pack. And let's open the view menu and select drawing explorer window. You know the drill how this works, right, with the resizing and the pining and all that good stuff, so we won't cover that again. What we're seeing in drawing explorer is a Windows Explorer-ish view that represents all of the objects that comprise your Visio drawing, from foreground pages, which is your actual drawing page, to background pages, which we'll discuss later in this tutorial series, where you can add some graphic flair to a diagram. And we also have styles, master shapes and then any formatting for fills and lines. So one simple thing you can do here is rename foreground pages. You'll notice that right now we have page one and page two. We'll call page one, just double click here; we'll call this one wide-area networking or WAN. And you'll notice as soon as we make that change, it's updated down here on the page tab. For page two, let's just call this our local-area networking page, or LAN. You see? Now, if we open up masters, we'll see instances or references to the master shapes for every shape used in this drawing. So you see router and switch and all this good stuff and if you right click any of those guys, we have the opportunity to edit the master's properties, edit the shape or edit the icon image. Let's just select master properties. This brings up the master properties sheet and what's nice about this is that you can change the keywords that are used for that shape; also the hover prompt from the source stencil and so on and so forth. So basically, while I frankly don't use the drawing explorer all that much in my daily work with Visio, it's nice to know that it's here and provides a simple, tree-like navigation structure for you to drill in and see and possibly edit all of the object that comprise your Visio drawing file.