Applies to
Microsoft Visio® 2002

When you're staring at an empty patch of soil, it can be difficult to visualize how many different vegetables you can fit in the available space, how much space to allocate for tomatoes vs. eggplants, carrots vs. cabbage, and so on.

Using Visio 2002, you can design a scale diagram of your garden plot and create shapes that represent the vegetables that you want to plant so you can experiment with different arrangements on the plot. You can even store the vegetable shapes and reuse them for future garden planning.

Tip  Because Visio gives you the flexibility of creating your own customized, reusable shapes, you can apply the techniques that you learn in this article to any other planning or design project you might want to undertake.

This article describes how to:

• Set up the drawing page.
• Set a drawing scale.
• Outline the garden plot.
• Create shapes that represent the vegetables that you want to plant.
• Store the vegetable shapes on a stencil so they are easy to add to the garden plot and so you can reuse them later.
• Lay out the planting arrangement.

Set up the drawing page

Setting up the drawing page involves orienting the page so it is the right shape to accommodate your garden plot. By default, the page is taller than it is wide. If your garden plot is wider than it is deep, you may want to switch the page orientation from Portrait (tall) to Landscape (wide).

To set up the drawing page

1. Start Visio 2002. On the File menu, point to New, and then click New Drawing.
2. On the File menu, click Page Setup.
3. On the Print Setup tab, for Paper orientation, if your plot is taller than it is wide, choose Portrait; if your plot is wider than it is tall, choose Landscape.
4. Click OK.
5. To name and save the new drawing, on the File menu, click Save As, type a name for the drawing, and then click Save.

Set a drawing scale

By setting a scale on the drawing page, you can accurately estimate how many vegetables your garden plot is likely to hold.

When you're deciding what scale to set, keep the following measurement information in mind: At a scale of 1 inch equals 2 feet (or 10 millimeters equals 1 meter), you can draw a garden plot of about 18 feet x 25 feet (or 20 meters x 25 meters) on a standard letter-sized page. Choosing a scale that allows your plot to fit on a standard page size makes it easy to print the garden plan for use at the site when you're planting.

To set a drawing scale

1. In the garden diagram for which you set up the drawing page, on the File menu, click Page Setup.
2. Click the Drawing Scale tab, and then click Custom scale.
3. In the box on the left, type the number of units on the drawing page (for example, 1 inch or 10 millimeters) that you want to equate to real-world units.
4. In the box on the right, type the number of real-world units (for example, 2 feet or 1 meter) that you want the drawing page units to represent.
5. Click OK.

   The units on the rulers at the top and left of the drawing page now represent units in the real world.

6. On the File menu, click Save.

Tip  By default, the zero point on the rulers is set at the lower left corner of the drawing page. To change the zero point position for one ruler, hold down the CTRL key, and then drag from the other ruler. For example, to change the vertical ruler's zero point to the top rather than the bottom of the page, hold down the CTRL key, and then drag from the horizontal ruler. Release the mouse button when the dashed line is at the top of the page.

Outline the garden plot

After you set the scale for the drawing page, the next step is to draw an outline that matches the shape and size of your garden plot.

To draw an outline of the garden plot

1. In the diagram where you have set a drawing scale, if you can't see the entire drawing page, on the Standard toolbar, in the Zoom box, click Page.
2. On the Standard toolbar, click the Rectangle tool.
3. Using the dimensions that appear in the bar at the bottom of the window as a guide, draw a rectangle that approximately matches the dimensions of your garden plot.
4. To allow the drawing page grid to be visible on the garden plot so you can accurately place the vegetable shapes, with the rectangle selected, on the Formatting toolbar, click the arrow on the Fill color tool, and then click No Fill.
5. If your garden plot isn't rectangular, on the Standard toolbar, click the Pencil tool.

   Tip  To see the Pencil tool, you may need to click the arrow beside the Line tool.

6. Place the cursor over one of the green diamonds at the corners of the rectangle or over one of the green circles in the middle of the rectangle's sides (as the following diagram illustrates), and drag to modify the shape of the rectangle until it matches the exact size and shape of your garden plot.

   

7. On the Standard toolbar, click the Pointer tool.
8. Save the diagram.

Create vegetable shapes

You can quickly create shapes that represent the vegetables you want to plant by modifying existing shapes from the Basic Shapes stencil and/or using the Visio drawing tools.

The vegetable shapes that you create can be simple line drawings or they can be realistic depictions of vegetables.

As you create the shapes, keep in mind that it's most useful if a shape's size represents the space each plant is likely to occupy. For example, when you draw shapes that represent tomatoes, size them so that they occupy approximately 2 feet x 2 feet (or 1 meter x 1 meter) on the scaled drawing page.

Because you can store the shapes on a stencil and drag as many copies of each shape as you want from the stencil onto the drawing page, in this step you need to create only one copy of each shape.

To quickly create vegetable shapes

1. In the garden diagram for which you set a drawing scale, on the File menu, point to Stencils, and then click Open Stencil.
2. In the Open Stencil dialog box, double-click the Block diagram folder, and then double-click Basic Shapes.vss.
3. Drag a shape that you want to use to represent a vegetable onto the drawing page, and then type the name of the vegetable it is to represent.

   To make the text larger or smaller, on the Formatting toolbar, choose a font size from the Font Size box.

4. To fill the shape with a color, on the Formatting toolbar, click the arrow on the Fill Color button, and then choose the color you want.
5. You probably want to size the vegetable shapes to represent the area they will take up in the garden. To resize the shape, drag a corner selection handle until the shape is the size you want.

   As you drag a shape's selection handle to resize it, the shape's dimensions in real-world units appear in the bar at the bottom of the screen.

   

6. Repeat Steps 3 through 5 for each vegetable shape that you want to create.

To design realistic-looking vegetable shapes

1. In the garden diagram for which you set a drawing scale, locate the following drawing tools on the Standard toolbar:

   

   With these tools, you can draw rectangles and ellipses, as well as straight, curved, and free-form lines.

2. For help in using the drawing tools, on the Help menu, click Microsoft Visio Help. Click the Contents tab. Next to Create your own, click the plus sign (+), and then next to Shapes, click the plus sign (+). Use any of the topics here to help you create the vegetable shapes that you want.
3. After you have drawn your vegetable shapes, use the Fill color and Line color buttons to add colors to the shapes.

Store the vegetable shapes on a stencil

A stencil in Visio is similar to a painter's palette. In the same way that a painter places colors on a palette for a particular painting, you can place shapes on a stencil for a particular diagram.

Unlike paint colors on a palette, shapes on a stencil never run dry. You can reuse them again and again by dragging them from the stencil and dropping them on the drawing page. You can also save the stencil and its shapes as a separate file that you can open whenever you want to use these shapes or add new ones.

To create a stencil and store vegetable shapes on it

1. In the garden diagram where you created your vegetable shapes, on the File menu, point to Stencils, and then click New Stencil.

   A new, blank green stencil opens next to the drawing window.

2. Drag one of the vegetable shapes that you created onto the stencil.

   The shape disappears from the drawing page and appears as an icon on the stencil, with a default name of Master.0. You can place a shape back on the page later without deleting the icon on the stencil.

3. Click the shape icon on the stencil, and then click the text under the icon. Type a new name for the shape.
4. Repeat Steps 2 and 3 for each vegetable shape that you want to store on the stencil.
5. In the stencil title bar, click the icon with the red asterisk, and then click Save As.
6. Type a name for the stencil.
7. Browse to the Program Files\Microsoft Office\Visio 10\1033\Solutions folder. Click the New Folder icon, type a name for the folder where you want to store stencils related to garden plot diagrams, and then click OK. Click Save.
8. To save the new stencil as part of the garden plot diagram, on the Visio File menu, click Save.

Tip  If you create a new garden plot diagram in the future and you want to use your vegetable shapes, on the Visio File menu, point to Stencils, and then click Open Stencil. In the Solutions folder, double-click the folder where you stored your garden files, select your stencil, and then click Open.

Lay out the planting arrangement

With the outline of your garden plot in place and the vegetable shapes created and stored on a stencil, you are ready to experiment with different layouts for where you want vegetables to be planted.

Particularly in a larger garden plot, remember to plan for pathways so you can move around easily as you plant and weed. At a minimum, a pathway should be about 2 feet (or 1 meter) wide. Make the pathway wider if you want it to accommodate a wheelbarrow.

To lay out the planting arrangement

1. In the garden plot diagram you created, drag vegetable shapes from the stencil where you stored them onto the garden plot on the drawing page.
2. When the arrangement is complete, to save the diagram, on the File menu, click Save.
3. To print the diagram so you can have a copy with you as you plant, on the File menu, click Print, and then click OK.

Tip  If you want to decorate your garden pathway with stones, you can search for stone shapes to add to your diagram. On the Standard toolbar, click the Find Shape button. In the Find Shape window, type the words "stone" and "pathway" and then click Go. Drag copies of the shapes that you want to use onto the pathway in your garden plot. You may need to resize the stone shapes to make them fit on your path. If you expect to use the stone shapes in future garden diagrams that you create, follow the preceding steps to add the shapes to your vegetable shapes stencil.