Subtitles of the Movie

If your work with Visio is anything like mine, then the final steps before I put the very finishing touches on my Visio drawing are to make it look pretty as a whole; that is to say, once I figure out what I want the Visio diagram to show me and I've brought out the requisite shapes, I've aligned them properly, I formatted the shapes as much as I want to in terms of alignment and so forth, the final step for me is to do some global touchup to make the document presentable to whomever I'm submitting it to. So I'm going to show you a nifty built-in feature called themes that allow us to very quickly apply global formatting to certain types of Visio drawings. Now, be aware that the themes feature works best for objects that involve A, a background and B, geometrical shapes like organizational charts, flow charts, brainstorming diagrams. The themes tend not to work so well for things like office layouts or building plans, network diagrams and so forth and that's simply because you're using graphical shapes in those cases, rather than simple geometrical figures. Ok? So keep that in mind. What you're looking at right now is a brainstorming diagram that comes from that sample pack from Microsoft and let's go ahead and use the themes feature to spruce this up. It looks OK as it is, but we can make it look a lot better. Now, as I mentioned before, uh, you get the most bang for your buck by applying a solid background first to the diagram. Now, there's a built-in stencil called backgrounds here. I have it up on my screen. If you don't have it as part of your template, you can open shapes, come down to Visio extras and then select backgrounds from the submenu. We'll talk in much greater detail about backgrounds later in the course. For now, what we probably want is the background solid and you can just drag that out onto the drawing page and it blends in, it doesn't do anything initially so there's no harm in adding a solid background to the drawing and you'll notice down at the bottom we have a V Background-1 page added to our document. That's what we do want to see. Let's close out of the shapes window and we'll open format and select theme. This opens up the theme task pane. Now, how does this work? You've got two different theme styles. One are overall color changes; the second, theme effects. So first let's look at our theme colors. We've got plenty of different color-coordinated options from which we can choose and you just select the appropriate one that looks nice and, in this case, it looks like I'm using an older version of a Visio document; that is to say a Visio doc that was created in an earlier version. I'll click yes and it made that subtle change. Not bad, huh? I'm going to do a control Z to step back. If we get down towards the bottom of the list we see more dramatic ones that involve a background color. So again, I'm going to apply that change and that's quite nice, isn't it? Wow. It's kind of dark. You want to be careful with printing these out on paper when we have a solid background. But it might work. It might work nonetheless. The other theme is called the theme effect and theme effects just provide, as you see, it's subdued. Or if I scroll down the list, depending upon what you're doing in your primary theme, that is to say in your theme colors, theme effects do some just stylistic changes. You'll notice, let me close out of theme effects and bring our zoom level up to say a hundred percent. The theme effect has rounded the edges of certain shapes. It's taken our connectors and applied a different style to them. It's quite nice, isn't it? So let's back this out to the page size again and for an on-screen display or a full-color printout, that's not too bad indeed. So that, in a nutshell, is how we use the themes feature. And again, the way to do that is to select format, theme, and then in the theme task pane, we would select first a global color scheme and then secondarily and optionally, the theme effects area to kind of put a little what's called bling to that. The final thing I'll say, if you want to remove theme effects or theme colors from the diagram, you notice that there's a none category here. If you choose none for both theme effects and theme colors, that's a way to remove or strip away any color themes that you have added to a diagram.