Building a Visio Model

Tutorial

Design, automation, implementing new technology, drag and drop, glue, text

See how Visio's features make it user-friendly and powerful yet flexible enough to work the way you do.

One of Visio’s characteristic features is Drag and Drop, which lets you add shapes to a drawing page by dragging them from a customizable palette of stencils and dropping them onto the page with just a click of the mouse. Once shapes are placed on the drawing page, you can easily modify their geometry and behavior, either manually on the drawing page or automatically through the ShapeSheet, a spreadsheet that displays information about a shape’s dimensions and behavior. All aspects of a shape are controlled in the ShapeSheet, in a series of cells into which formulas and values are entered to customize shape behavior.

Drag and drop shapes from stencils right onto your drawing page in Visio
Visio's drag and drop feature is the fast way to make intelligent drawings.

Another key feature of Visio is the ability to glue shapes together using 1D lines and connectors. This is very convenient for network diagrams and organizational charts, where specific shapes need to be glued in place or connected by a series of lines.

Gluing shapes together keeps them connected even though you might move shapes around.
Glued connectors show up with red handles in Visio.

Text plays an important role in many diagrams, and Visio gives you thorough control over text and its behavior. For example, Visio lets you manipulate text placement anywhere on the drawing page as well as customize text behavior by deciding whether or not text should rotate with a shape or if it should flip upside down as a shape is flipped, etc.

Text controls in Visio
Manipulate text with dialog controls accessed through a right mouse click on selected text.

The Visio Basics tutorial is based on training material devised, created and delivered by Visimation.

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