4. Finding More Options
If you can’t find a button for something you want to
change, there are two things to look for that lead you to more options.
First is dialog box launcher buttons that you see in the lower-right
corner of some Ribbon groups like Font and Paragraph. Second is menu
items that end with “dot-dot-dot.” The ellipsis always means that a
dialog with more options will appear when you click it.
In your exploration of shape formatting features,
you’ve probably already seen More Colors..., Fill Options..., More
Lines..., More Arrows..., Line Options..., Shadow Options..., all of
which lead to detailed settings dialogs for customizing your shapes.
One example that you see multiple times is More
Colors... This menu item pops up the Colors dialog, which has two nifty
tabs for picking just the right color. You can see it in Figure 2.
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The
Colors’ Custom tab is handy if you’re working with designers in your
art department and need to match specific, corporate colors. Custom
colors that you pick or define show up in the Recent Colors area of the
various formatting drop-downs, but this list changes: as you use new
colors, older colors drop off the end.
To save custom colors, you can create a simple
rectangle or circle and apply the color to the shape. Then you can use
the Format Painter control from Home, Clipboard to apply it to other
shapes. You can save these custom color shapes as masters in your
Favorites stencil or just put them on another page in the document.
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5. Formatting Groups
Complicated shapes can be built by
grouping simpler pieces together and nice effects created by layering
shapes on top of one another.
When you select a group and apply formatting, Visio
applies it to the group and all its submembers. This can either save
you lots of time or totally ruin your shape!
To complicate matters, some grouped shapes have
built-in protection and intelligence to better handle this all-at-once
formatting. The discrepancy in behavior can be confusing, so it’s
important that you understand what is going on.
Figure 4 contrasts “intelligent formatting” behavior versus “dumb formatting” behavior for several grouped shapes.
See that all of the subshapes in the groups on the
right get blasted with a darker fill color? All subtlety and
differentiation are lost when the new fill color is applied. The shapes
on the left behave so well that it is hard to even notice that the
color was changed.
Unfortunately, the dumb behavior is the default in
Visio. If you draw your own shapes using the drawing tools and then
group them together, your groups react to formatting in this way.
You will encounter both types of behavior. Indeed, all the shapes in Figure 4 come from stencils that ship with Visio.
To avoid ruining grouped shapes, you can subselect
individual members and format them. Subselecting is as easy as clicking
on the group, pausing a split second, and then clicking again on a part.
For example, in Figure 4, you could subselect the coffee cup icon and change it to a deep brown color, while leaving the background rectangle white.
Yet one more wrinkle in this story is that some shapes are locked against subselection. The intelligent shapes in Figure 4
don’t allow subselection at all—but then again, you don’t really need
to subselect the items since they handle formatting so well. The shapes
on the right, however, are not protected, so you can freely select and
alter individual subshapes.
You will eventually run into groups with subshapes
that you want to individually change but are locked against
subselection. In this case, you can open the group to work with the
individual subshapes inside. Just right-click the shape, choose Group,
and then choose Open Shapename. In
the group-editing window that appears, you can directly access the
subshapes. Here, you can make formatting changes to the pieces. One
last warning, however. Shape designers can lock down formatting on
subshapes of groups, too, so you still might not be able to change the
subshapes! It doesn’t hurt to try, though.
6. Setting Default Formatting
You can set the default line, fill, and text
attributes for shapes created with the drawing tools. Just choose
settings from the Fill, Line, Shadow, Font, and Paragraph controls
while no shapes are selected in your diagram.
For example, choose the color red from the Fill
drop-down with no shapes selected. Now when you use the Rectangle tool
or Ellipse tool to draw a shape, it is filled with red.
Unfortunately, these settings are forgotten when you
close the drawing file, but this capability can be a real timesaver
during an intense drawing session. Also note that these settings have
no effect on masters dropped on your page—only new shapes you create
using the drawing tools.
