Don't let your first glance fool you. Microsoft Office Visio 2007 is a lot easier to use than it looks. To get started, all you need to know are a few basic steps and terms. Before long, you'll be able to go from a blank page to a drawing that makes your point and looks great.

Don’t have the 2007 Office release yet? You can download a free trial or buy it now.

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• What is Visio for?

• Create a drawing in 3 basic steps

• Exactly what are Visio shapes, stencils, and templates?

• What's next?

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What is Visio for?

People use Visio to create a great variety of drawings, ranging from network diagrams to calendars, and from office layouts to flowcharts. To find out about the many kinds of drawings that Visio can help you make, see How can I tell what each Visio template is for?

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Create a drawing in 3 basic steps

There are many kinds of Visio drawings, but you can use the same three basic steps to create nearly all of them:

1. Choose and open a template.
2. Drag and connect shapes.
3. Add text to shapes.

The following steps show how to create a basic flowchart. To learn how to use the full range of Visio templates and features, you can see Visio Help and the Microsoft Office Online Web site:

• Visio 2007 Help and How-to home page
• Visio 2007 Training Courses
• Visio 2007 Demos

Step 1: Choose and open a template

1. Start Visio 2007.
2. In the Template Categories list, click Flowchart.
3. In the Flowchart window, under Featured Templates, double-click Basic Flowchart.

When you open a template, the shapes you need open with it, in collections called stencils. The stencils that open with the Basic Flowchart template are called Arrow Shapes, Backgrounds, and Basic Flowchart Shapes.

Step 2: Drag and connect shapes

To create your drawing, all you need to do is drag shapes from stencils onto the blank drawing page and connect them to one another. There are many ways to connect shapes, but for now let's use the fastest — drag the shapes on top of each other to connect them automatically by using AutoConnect. For more information, see Add and glue connectors with AutoConnect.

1. Drag your first shape from the Basic Flowchart Shapes stencil onto the drawing page, and then release the mouse button.

   

2. Drag your second shape on top of the first so that the blue arrows show, but don't release the mouse button yet.

   

3. While holding the mouse button, move your pointer on top of the blue arrow that points toward where you want to place the second shape.

   

4. Now release the mouse button. Your shapes are connected, and the first shape points to the second shape.

   

5. Continue to build your drawing by repeating steps 2-4.

Step 3: Add text to shapes

Although some drawings make a point all by themselves, it's often helpful and sometimes necessary to add text to the shapes. There are many ways to add text to shapes, but for now let's use the simplest way. If you want to learn more ways to add text to shapes, see Add data to shapes and Add imported data to shapes.

Add text directly to a shape

1. Double-click the shape.

   

2. Start typing.

   

3. When you finish typing, click on a blank area of the drawing page.

   

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Exactly what are Visio shapes, stencils, and templates?

We already talked about these a little bit, but knowing more about Visio shapes, stencils, and templates can make Visio much easier to use.

Shapes

Visio shapes are ready-made images that you drag onto your drawing page — they are the building blocks of your drawing.

When you drag a shape from a stencil onto your drawing page, the original shape remains on the stencil. That original is called a master shape. The shape that you put on your drawing is a copy — also called an instance — of that master. From most Visio stencils, you can drag as many instances of the same shape onto your drawing as you want.

There are many ways to use and customize Visio shapes, but you can accomplish a lot with only the most popular methods and a few special features.

Customize shapes on the spot

There are thousands of Visio shapes and countless ways to use and customize them. The most common things that people do with shapes involve features that are built right into the shapes. Visual cues help you find and use those features quickly.

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The bright green dots located above shapes are called rotation handles. Drag a rotation handle right or left to rotate the shape.

The light blue connection arrows help you easily connect shapes to one another, as you saw in the previous section, Create a drawing in three basic steps. However, there is more than one way to use AutoConnect, so for more information, see Add and glue connectors with AutoConnect.

You can use the bright green selection handles to change the height and width of your shape. Click and drag a selection handle on the corner of a shape to enlarge the shape without changing its proportions, or click and drag a selection handle on the side of a shape to make the shape taller or wider.

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Special features of Visio shapes

Visio shapes are much more than simple images or symbols.

Shapes can hold data

Each shape can be associated with data. There are a number of ways you can add data to shapes. For more information, see Add data to shapes and Add imported data to shapes. For now, let's just see how to view or display the data after it is added.

After data is added to a shape, it isn't displayed in the drawing by default. The easiest way to see the data is to select the shape and then open the Shape Data window, as shown in the illustration below.

If you want to display the data for lots of shapes at once, you can use a feature called Data Graphics. The following illustration shows the data for two trees at once. For more information about using Data Graphics, see Enhance your data with data graphics.

 Note   Data Graphics is only available in Microsoft Office Visio Professional 2007.

Shapes with special behavior

Too many Visio shapes have special behavior to list them all, but here are a couple of examples.

For example, you can stretch a People shape to show more people, or stretch the Growing flower shape to indicate growth.

 

The next illustration shows how you can measure the size of a shape on your page by using a special dimension shape that is designed for measuring other shapes. (The dimension shapes are only available in Office Visio Professional 2007.)

And below is a Pie chart shape from the Charting Shapes stencil. You can right-click the shape to set the number of slices and what percent each slice represents.

 Tip   A great way to find out what a shape can do is to right-click it to see if there are any special commands on its shortcut menu.

Stencils

Visio stencils hold collections of shapes. The shapes in each stencil have something in common. The shapes can be a collection of shapes that you need to create a particular kind of diagram, or several different versions of the same shape.

In the following illustration, the Basic Flowchart Shapes stencil contains common flowchart shapes, and the Backgrounds stencil contains a variety of backgrounds. You can even create your own stencil of favorite shapes. For information about creating your own stencil, see Create a new stencil.

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Open any Visio stencil

Each template opens with the stencils that you need to create a particular kind of drawing, but it's nice to know that you can open other stencils any time you want.

1. On the File menu, point to Shapes, point to the category that you want, and then click the name of the stencil that you want to use.
2. Repeat step 1 for any other stencils that you want to open.

   

Templates

Visio templates are a little harder to describe because they aren't a single thing — they are more like a collection of settings. A Visio template combines a blank drawing page with any combination of the following:

Stencils full of the shapes that are needed to create a particular kind of drawing    The Charts and Graphs template, for example, opens with a stencil full of quick, easy shapes for creating charts and graphs.

Appropriate grid size and ruler measurements  Some drawings require a special scale. For example, the Site Plan template opens with an engineering scale, where 1 inch equals 1 foot.

Special menus  Some templates have unique features that you can find on special menus. For example, when you open the Calendar template, a Calendar menu appears on the main menu bar. You can use the Calendar menu to configure your calendar or to import data from Microsoft Office Outlook into your calendar.

Wizards to help you with special types of drawings  In some cases when you open a Visio template, a wizard helps you get the drawing off to a good start. For example, the Space Plan template opens with a wizard that helps you set up your space and room information.

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What's next?

Here are some suggestions for how to get more familiar with Visio.

Get help creating a more complex drawing

You can use the steps in Create a drawing in 3 basic steps for many of the Visio templates. For the more complex templates, it's really helpful to read the article written for that specific template.

1. On the Help menu in Visio, click Microsoft Office Visio Help.

   

2. In the Help window, click the Show Table of Contents button.

   

3. In the Table of Contents window, click the category for the drawing that you want to create.

   

 Tip   You can find all kinds of information in Visio Help if you take a few minutes to browse through it.

Discover the variety of Visio templates

Depending on the edition of Visio you use, you have between 25 (for Microsoft Office Visio Standard 2007) and 64 (for Office Visio Professional 2007) different templates to work with. To find out more about these templates, browse through the Getting Started screen, which opens automatically when you start Visio. Click the various categories, and then click the template thumbnails to see larger versions of the thumbnails and short descriptions of the templates.

Browse through the stencils

Taking a moment to open the list of stencils is a great way to get to know more about the huge variety of shapes available, but exploring a few of the stencils themselves is even better.

You don't even have to open a diagram — just click Shapes on the File menu, and then navigate down to the stencil that you want to open.

Browse through the menus

Opening menus is another quick way to get a sense of what you can do in Visio. The View, Data, and Shape menus are three of the most popular menus.

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Remember — to learn more about getting started with Visio and using any Visio template, you can visit the Visio 2007 Help and How-to site on Office Online. It's home to the most up-to-date instructional demos, training courses, discussion groups, and product information, and all of the Help articles.

• Visio 2007 Help and How-to home page
• Visio 2007 Training Courses
• Visio 2007 Demos

Don’t have the 2007 Office release yet? You can try it or buy it now.

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