3. Curing Menu Cascade-itis
Visio 2010 reduced toolbar clutter by combining
toolbar buttons with cascading menus. I find the right-click
mini-toolbar wonderfully convenient, and most of the formatting options
come with live preview, which is an extra bonus.
If, however, you are making lots of formatting
edits, frequent cascading is tiring. For example, I often find myself
changing the color, weight, pattern, and arrowhead style of a line.
This requires four separate, multilevel trips into the Line drop-down.
In the last exercise, you saw how the Line, Fill,
Shadow, and Text dialogs enable you to make multiple changes at once.
If you are in the middle of a formatting frenzy, using these dialogs is
often faster and easier. For all but the text options, however, you
still have to expand a drop-down list just to get to the dialogs. You
can speed up the process by customizing the Ribbon or Quick Access
Toolbar so that you can directly access the dialogs with one mouse
click.
Creating a Custom Ribbon Tab for Quick Line, Fill, and Text Editing
1. | Start with a new, blank drawing.
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2. | Draw
a few test rectangles on the page. Add some text to the shapes. Play
with formatting the shapes via the controls on the Home tab or by
right-clicking.
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3. | Change
the line color, line weight, and line pattern for a shape using the
Line drop-down and cascading into the Weight and Dashes items. Imagine
doing this many times. Feel the pain.
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4. | Right-click any area on the Ribbon and choose Customize the Ribbon.
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5. | In
the Customize Ribbon dialog, click the New Tab button on the lower
right. Notice that a new tab and new group are added to the list.
Controls on a tab must be in a group.
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6. | Right-click New Tab and choose Rename. Change the name to Using Visio.
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7. | Similarly, rename New Group to Format. Make sure Format is highlighted in the list.
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8. | In the Choose Commands From drop-down list, pick All Commands.
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9. | Select
Fill Options... in the commands list and then click Add >>. Fill
Options is added to your custom Format Group on the right.
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10. | Similarly,
add the items: Shadow Options, Line Options, and Text to your custom
group. If you make a mistake, select an item in the Main Tabs list on
the right and then click the Remove button.
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11. | Change
the position of the Using Visio tab by selecting it and then pressing
the up or down arrow on the right of the dialog box.
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12. | When you are satisfied with your changes, click OK. You should see your new Using Visio Ribbon tab, as shown in Figure 1. Clicking the buttons in your new Format group instantly launches the Line, Fill, or Shadow options dialogs.
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If you don’t want to bother creating a new
menu tab, you can add the same items to the Quick Access Toolbar. If
you look closely at the top-left corner of Figure 1, you can see I’ve done this already. To add these buttons, just right-click on the Fill Options, Shadow Options, and Line Options menu items and then choose Add to Quick Access Toolbar.
