Datasheet

To learn about how to define properties and behaviors for shapes, see Chapter 33.

In Visio, predrawn shapes are called masters, which are stored and categorized in stencils. When

you drag and drop a master from a stencil onto your drawing page, you create a copy, called an

instance of that master. Each instance inherits its master’s behaviors, so it knows how to act when

you add it to your drawing. It also inherits its master’s properties, so you can assign unique values

to an instance.

As you’ll learn in detail in Chapter 4, shapes have handles to help you position, resize, and connect

them to one another. When you select a shape, Visio marks these features with colored graphics, so

you can drag them to make the changes you want. Shapes include the following types of handles:

Selection handles — Red or green boxes appear when you select a shape. You can drag

these selection handles to resize a shape or attach connectors to them.

Connection points — Blue Xs mark locations where you can glue connectors or lines.

Rotation handle — This is a red or green circle that you can drag to rotate a shape.

Control handles — Yellow diamonds appear on some shapes. You can drag control han-

dles to modify a shape’s appearance — for example, to change the swing on a door.

Eccentricity handles — You can drag these green circles to change the shape of an arc.

Connecting Shapes

Relationships often convey as much information as the elements they connect. Whether you are

showing who reports to a manager in an organization or defining the relationship between two

database tables, connections between Visio shapes not only provide information about a relation-

ship, but they also help you lay out and rearrange the shapes on your drawing.

To learn more about connecting shapes, see Chapter 5.

What Connectors Do

At their simplest, connectors are linear shapes with other shapes attached to each end. However,

connectors have smarts of their own. When you move two connected shapes, the connector

between them adjusts to maintain that connection. Likewise, connectors reconfigure to keep

shapes connected when you use automatic layout tools in Visio. For example, you can change the

layout of an organization chart from horizontal to vertical and the connectors alter their paths as

the employee shapes take up their new locations.

Connectors have start and end points that define the direction of the connection between shapes.

Which end you connect to a shape can make a big difference in behavior. For example, in a data-

base model, the table shape at the start of a connector is the

parent, whereas the table at the end of

a connector is the

child. When you define a one-to-many relationship between those connected

tables, the one is associated with the table at the connector’s start point and the many belongs to

the table at the connector’s end point.

CROSS-REF

Getting Started with Visio

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