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Microsoft Support WebCast Note This document is based on the original spoken Support WebCast transcript. It has been edited for clarity. Heidi Moeller: Hello, and welcome to the Microsoft® Support WebCast Program. We'd like to thank all of you for joining us today. Our topic will "Visio® 2000: Understanding and Using Layout and Routing." Our presenter will be Cindy Leach. I'm Heidi Moeller and I'll be your host for today's session. We'll start this session with Cindy's presentation and follow that up with a question-and-answer period when the presentation is finished. We only answer questions submitted for the Support WebCast during the live event. I'd like to now take a moment to introduce Cindy: Cindy has worked in Visio product support since 1993 and is currently the product lead for Visio Standard Edition. Thank you so much for joining us today, Cindy. Cindy Leach: Hello and welcome to our layout and routing WebCast. I hope the information you hear today will be useful. If possible, I think it will be helpful to you to have Visio running and step through some of the discussion along with me. Most of the information presented today will be specific to Visio 2000, although some of the information is also applicable to Visio 5.0. I would also like to thank Larry Boyes, Chloe Bracis, and Scott LeGendre of the Visio Division for their assistance in providing additional information and answering my questions. Now let's begin. Slide 2. Many people who use Visio create simple drawings such as flowcharts, organization charts, or simple block diagrams. When creating these drawings, most people do not think much about how connectors attach to shapes and stick with shapes as they are moved around the page; they simply know that they do. In the Visio group, we call drawings that utilize connectors and shapes "connected drawings." In fact, most Visio drawings are connected drawings. Organization charts, flowcharts, network diagrams, engineering diagrams, and more all show relationships between objects using lines. Most begin their drawings by a choosing a drawing type or template. You begin by dragging and dropping shapes onto the drawing page, arranging shapes as needed. Along the way, you can use the Dynamic Connector to make the connections between shapes in the order you find most useful. As the drawing is built, you can edit it by moving the connected shapes around, adding and deleting shapes, and adding or deleting the connections between the shapes. When these changes are made, Visio will create and update the connector pathways in a way that is expected and removes the need to manually update the connectors. Visio should take care of the rerouting while you take care to assemble your drawing. Much development time and effort have been expended to make this as seamless as possible. Shapes stay connected while they are moved around the drawing page. Connectors bend in a way that is expected for a particular drawing type. Some connectors have been programmed to reroute in a way that makes sense for each drawing type, rerouting around shapes and avoiding other connectors. Because continual automatic changes in a drawing can be disconcerting, much of the automatic routing has been limited to only when necessary. This is how Visio has been designed to behave and, in most cases, it works quite well. In some cases, however, your intentions may not match how Visio is interpreting your actions. You may decide to modify Visio's own settings for layout and routing of connectors. The reality is that there are too many scenarios for Visio to determine to everyone's satisfaction. This talk will explain Visio's layout and routing capabilities and what options you have for modification to make your drawing experience better. We'll cover some basics of connected drawings and move into some more advanced layout and routing features later in the talk. We'll cover where the layout and routing features are located in the program and how each one will impact different parts of Visio. Some options are set at the template level, some at the page level, and some just affect the shapes that are selected. Slide 3. What do I mean by connector? For the purposes of this talk, we will be speaking about 1-D, or one-dimensional, shapes. A one-dimensional shape is recognizable by its (usually) three selection handles or green squares that appear when the shape is selected. Connectors have an X on one end and a + sign on the other. The X and the + sign are important to note as connectors have a direction. The X indicates the begin point of the connector and the + indicates the end point of the connector. Using the Dynamic Connector, the first shape that is connected will have the begin point of the connector while the second shape will have the end point of the connector. It is also helpful to know which is the begin point and which is the end point when assigning line ends or arrowheads to shapes. We'll cover in more detail why this is important later in the discussion. All toolbar items found under the line tool on the Standard toolbar can also be used to connect shapes. The Standard toolbar is typically the topmost toolbar in the Visio window. The line tool appears as a diagonal line much like a forward slash on your keyboard. Keep in mind when using the drawing tools that these will function as connectors only if one segment is drawn. When drawing more than one segment with the line tool, you are creating a two-dimensional shape, and it will no longer have connection capabilities. Note the eight handles surrounding the two-dimensional shape. You can, however, create connectors that appear like the shape on the right and I'll cover one way to do this when we get into manually modifying connectors. Slide 4. Also important is static versus dynamic glue. With static glue, the 1-D connector is glued to one specific point (called a connection point) on each 2-D shape and stays glued to those specific points when you reposition the shapes. If the connector is glued to the bottom of a shape, it will remain glued to the bottom of the shape regardless of where the shapes are moved on the page. An organization chart is a good example of a drawing type that utilizes static glue. The superior position should always have the connector attached to the bottom of the shape while the subordinate positions should remain connected from the top of the shape. If the connector rerouted freely, the managers might end up reporting to their staff instead of the other way around. With dynamic glue, the connector is glued to the shape and changes the point at which it is connected when you reposition the shape. Dynamic glue keeps the shapes connected at the closest available points. You can tell visually which type of glue is being used. When static glue is used, the end of the connector is a darker red with the X or + visible. Dynamic glue is a lighter red with no direction indicators. For the most part, connectors can use either static or dynamic glue with the exception of control handles that always use static glue. Slide 5. Now that there is a basic understanding of the different types of connectors and glue, we will focus mainly on the Dynamic Connector. While most connectors can use both static and dynamic glue, only the Dynamic Connector has advanced routing capabilities. The Dynamic Connector can be found in almost all Visio stencils near the bottom of the stencil. The connector tool in the Standard toolbar also utilizes the Dynamic Connector. This tool can be located to the immediate right of the pointer tool. Many shapes within Visio are 1-D shapes and can function as connectors. Any shape that has a begin and end point visible may be used as a connector. In addition, there is even a stencil, called Connectors.vss, made up entirely of connectors in the Visio Extras folder. These connectors may be used but will not have any special routing capabilities. In order for connectors to recognize other shapes and route around them, they need to be designated as placeable. Placeable is simply a behavior setting that can be activated if necessary. Slide 6. Since different drawing types require different looks, Visio provides predefined routing styles. This functionality affects how Visio decides to automatically route a connector and the overall appearance of your drawing. Visio developers set the routing styles when they design solutions. There are nine separate styles. Routing styles include the following:
Slide 7. This slide is actually slightly incorrect. Routing styles are set at the page level, not the drawing level, using the File, Page Setup, Layout and Routing tab. Drawings may have many pages and each page may have a different style. If you change these settings, all pages inserted after the setting change will be impacted. If you already have a multiple page drawing, you will need to set routing styles for each page. Keep in mind that these settings should be determined prior to creating your drawing. Making changes in this dialog box will not impact shapes already on the page, but they will change all future shapes dropped on the page. To determine what style you need, select the various options in the Style drop down list. You will see the styles change in the preview window to provide an indication of how the shapes will lay out. Slide 8. A Dynamic Connector may overwrite the page settings if it already has a different routing style assigned or by changing the settings of a Dynamic Connector individually.The Style option determines the routing style and direction for all connectors on the page that don't have a routing style specifically chosen for them. Most connectors will have Page Default as their style and that means they pick up whatever style has been chosen for them here. To determine which setting is in use for the connector, select it with the pointer tool, choose Format, Behavior, and then click the Connector tab. Additional information on routing styles and corresponding directions can be found in the Developer Help Reference. Also available in the page settings are line jumps. You can set lines to have no line jumps, just jump on the horizontal lines, just jump on the vertical lines, or set line jump options based on when you have added the lines to the page. There are nine different settings you can choose regarding the appearance of line jumps as well as an option to change the size of the line jumps. Slide 9. You can set layout behavior by individual shape. In order to do so, the shape or shapes must be selected. Choose Format, Behavior, and choose the Connector tab. The connector tab is only visible when a connector is selected. These style options are exactly the same as the Layout & Routing toolbar and the layout and routing settings for the page. These options affect only the selected shape and override the page settings. Visio 2000 also introduced the Layout & Routing toolbar. Since this is not on by default, you will need to manually turn it on. To do so, click on the View menu, click toolbars, and check Layout & Routing. You can also turn on various toolbars by positioning your cursor in the toolbar area at the top of your screen. Right-click on the toolbar and check Layout & Routing. Most of the time, the toolbar will appear grayed out. The buttons on the toolbar become active only when connector shapes on the page are selected. The actions taken by the layout and routing toolbar are specific to the shapes selected and do not have any impact on the page settings. This is similar to the Connector tab in the Format, Behavior dialog. If Visio connectors are not behaving in a manner you desire, utilizing this toolbar can provide you with greater control. Slide 10. Visio 5.0 was the first release of automatically rerouting connectors. One issue commonly received by the support organization was that the connectors rerouted too easily and frequently as users edited their drawings. Rerouting depended upon where the shapes were moved, but were often unpredictable to users who were not familiar with the way routing worked. In response to user requests, the connectors do not reroute as frequently in Visio 2000. Also, in Visio 2000, there is an option to set connectors to never reroute. I'll cover briefly the different settings available. Reroute Freely — This is the most active reroute setting. Connectors will respond to many types of changes in the drawing by taking the optimum path as defined by Visio. This is the default setting for the Dynamic Connector. Slide 11. Reroute On Crossover — The connector will ignore other shapes that are moved or moved into its path, but will reroute if either of the shapes that are connected to it are moved in such a way that the connector will cross them. In other words, the connector will not route around a third shape. Slide 12. Reroute As Needed — Connectors will reroute under the same conditions as described in Reroute on Crossover setting, but will also reroute when a placeable shape is dropped, or moved from a significant distance away, onto its current path. As with all other reroute settings, Visio does not recognize non-placeable shapes, and, hence, connectors will not attempt to route around them. Slide 13. Never Reroute — This is the most restrictive setting. The connector will not reroute, but will adjust to remain glued to each shape. This is true whether the shapes are statically or dynamically glued. Slide 14. Under the rules of rerouting:
The goal of these rules is to anticipate the user's intentions to some extent and minimize the user's needs for manually changing the reroute setting of the connector. Slide 15. There are times when manually adjusting a Dynamic Connector is useful or necessary. The following mouse and keyboard actions are helpful when manually routing the Dynamic Connectors. You can change the depth of the bends in the connectors by placing your cursor over the control handle, which is the shaded green square on the connector, and moving in either direction pointed by the double headed arrow. Slide 16. You can add additional bends or vertices in a connector. If you start out with two shapes connected by a straight Dynamic Connector as depicted in the uppermost illustration [on the slide], you can create connectors that look like the two below. To create a connector similar to the shape on the left, position your mouse over the control handle (again, the shaded green square), hold down the Shift key and the left mouse button, and drag. This is called a "bridge." To create a connector similar to the one on the right, hold down the Control key and the left mouse button and drag while the cursor is positioned over the control handle. This is known as creating a vertex in the connector. As mentioned earlier, on slide 4, you can create connectors with fancy bends in them using these options. If you find you frequently need a particular connector, you may want to save it back to the stencil. To do so, select the connector after you've made modifications and drag it back to the stencil. Visio will ask you if you would like to edit the stencil. If you say yes, Visio will continue the operation. Remember to save the stencil before exiting so you will preserve the changes. Slide 17. Conversely, you can remove the bends and create straight connectors. Use the Control key again, but this time position the cursor over a vertex (the smaller, green, diamond shapes on the connector); hold down the mouse button, and drag. A dashed line should give you a visual indication when the connector is straight. One note about manually adjusting connectors with dynamic glue: you can move the connector away from the shape and it will still remained glued. However, it will not look like it is touching the shape. This is useful for drawing types that require the line not to completely touch the shape. If you do not want this behavior, disconnect the connector and reconnect using static glue. With static glue, Visio will not allow the connector to be moved off the shape when manually adjusting it. One additional note: These actions are different than one would use with other connectors, statically glued connectors, and connectors created with the line tool. Slide 18. I've mentioned the term placeable shape several times earlier in the talk and a simple definition mentioned previously is: a 2-D shape that is set to work with routable connectors and automatic layout (Lay Out Shapes). If a shape is set as placeable, a routable connector can detect and avoid crossing through it. You set a shape as placeable under Format, Behavior, and selecting the Placement tab. There are three placement behavior options:
Slide 19. The Lay Out Shapes dialog can be found under the Tools menu. This dialog is important for automation purposes and will be useful for only a small subset of people. The major purpose of the Lay Out Shapes dialog is to arrange connected shapes on the drawing page so that the connector routing is simplified and easy to follow. You can think of it as untangling the connectors. Lay Out Shapes is also known as automatic layout. With certain types of connected drawings, such as flowcharts and network diagrams, you can use Lay Out Shapes to automatically position shapes. Positioning shapes automatically can help you revise large drawings more quickly than using the pointer tool to select and drag each one to the new location. For example, if you're updating a large flowchart to include a new process, you can add and connect the shapes that make up the process, and then use Tools, Lay Out Shapes to automatically lay out the updated drawing. Not all solutions are suited to using Lay Out Shapes. The solutions that work best with Lay Out Shapes are flowchart, network diagramming, organization chart, or other types of connected drawings. Also, some placement styles work better for some drawing types than for others. For instance, most organization charts would not be well represented using the circular layout style. If you are not sure which style to use, you can apply different types or use the Preview window to get an idea of the type of layout. If you are not satisfied with the results, choose Edit, Undo Lay Out Shapes to get your drawing back to its original layout. We also need to discuss how begin and end point direction affects how the drawing is laid out. For a top-to-bottom drawing, the begin point is connected to the top shape, and the end point is connected to the bottom shape. If the points were reversed, the shapes would be laid out in the opposite order. For other drawings, the shapes are laid out in the direction in which they were placed. Slide 20. If not all of your shapes on the page should be automatically laid out, you can apply settings to selected shapes only. If nothing is selected, all shapes on the current page will automatically be laid out. Placement options refer to 2-D shapes: Style sets the style for how the shapes will be laid out. Look at the preview to see if that's what you want. Some types have no direction, such as radial, and will keep the direction drop down list grayed out. Direction specifies the direction your Visio product uses to place shapes. Look at the preview to see if that's what you want. Typically, the Placement Direction and Connectors Direction should match. Direction is used for directed drawing styles, such as flowcharts, tree diagrams, organization charts, process flow drawings, and other drawings that flow in a specific direction. Depth determines how much space to leave between shapes so that all the shapes fit. In many drawings, you have to compromise between how shapes are visually grouped and how space-efficient the drawing is. Here are a few tips:
The Connectors section applies to 1-D shapes: Here, Style indicates the type of drawing path, or route, that is used to connect shapes. Direction specifies the direction of the routing style. As mentioned above, normally the Placement Direction and Connectors Direction should match. Apply routing style to connectors specifies to apply the routing style you selected to all connectors on the current page. The Spacing button opens the Layout and Routing Spacing dialog box in which you can specify the space between shapes, average shape size, space between connectors, and space between connectors and shapes. Slide 21. The Layout and Routing Spacing dialog can be accessed either through Tools, Layout Shapes or File, Page Setup, Layout and Routing. This dialog controls shape spacing and connector routing settings. You can use this to fine-tune the way shapes and connectors are placed. You can:
To make connectors easier to see in a large drawing, you can increase the amount of spacing between connectors or between shapes and connectors. The Connector to shape option sets the minimum amount of space between connectors and shapes and is indicated by the letter A in the illustration. The Connector to connector option specifies the minimum amount of space between connectors and is indicated by the letter B. The Space between space option specified the amount of space between placeable shapes and is indicated by the letter C. These all impact the layout shapes option. Another option in this Layout and Routing Spacing dialog is Average shape size. This specifies the average size of the shapes in your drawing. This setting also sets the average shape size used by the dynamic grid. Avoid using Layout and Routing Spacing if your drawing contains shapes of various sizes, particularly shapes that exceed the average shape size. You can position these shapes more precisely without Tools, Lay Out Shapes. So, to wrap it up, there are a variety of ways to set your layout and routing options, you can either set styles to affect the drawing or the shape, or you can use the layout shapes dialog to reroute a drawing in progress. Additional information can be found in the online help and developer reference help. That's about it for the presentation. I guess we can move into questions now. Thanks, everybody. Heidi: Thank you so much, Cindy. It is time to move on to the Q&A portion of this Support WebCast. Joining Cindy for the Q&A, we have Chloe Bracis. She is a software test engineer and worked on the layout and routing for Visio 2000. We have had some questions submitted, so let's go ahead and get started. The first question is: Is there anything I can do if I don't like the way Visio reroutes updates? Cindy: Well there's several things you can do. If you're using the Dynamic Connector, you can certainly set all of the connectors to "never reroute" and it won't reroute automatically for you and that setting will never be changed. And as I mentioned before, you can certainly create your own connectors and you also have a connector stencil. Heidi: Excellent. Moving right along, the next question is: I am new to Visio. Is a 1-D shape essentially a line? And is a 2-D shape essentially a polygon? Cindy: That's a good quick summary of it. One dimensional shapes can also be polygons, it's just a way to decide, the 1-D shapes will typically have, as I mentioned in the session, a begin point and an end point. So, for instance, if you want to see what a 1-D shape looks like that isn't a line, go into the basic stencil and look at some of the arrows. We use those for things like block diagrams, and you can see an example of something that isn't a line typically that we use for connectors. Chloe: You can also convert 2-D shapes to 1-D shapes in the Format, Behavior dialog. Heidi: Excellent. The next question is: How has layout and routing changed in Visio 2000 compared to the previous version? Cindy: Well, there are a lot of changes that we made: the information was actually in the product in 5.0, but what we did was we exposed this to the user. So some things that are new are line-to-line routing. We've added additional line jump options, and you can set the line jumps on a per-object basis. Before, you could just set a line jump option for the whole page. We also have semipermeable shapes, connectors working with new connection point directions. There are new glue features in Visio 2000 such as fold to shape geometry. A lot of this, I think, probably merits some additional explanation, but it's probably not within the scope of the talk. If you search on information that I mentioned here in the online help, I think that will give you a good indication of what those features are. Heidi: Moving right along to the next question: Does the template I choose — networking, diagram, flowchart, etc. — have an effect on the default layout and routing settings in the drawing? Cindy: Yes, it does. The different templates were selected to have a specific routing style that would make the most sense for that type of drawing. For example, if you open up the basic flowchart template, it will have the routing style preselected as flowchart routing. And I believe the direction is top to bottom, since that's the typical flowchart. Other drawings frequently have other settings. I think the basic shapes have right angle connectors. So the routing style is very much dependent on the type of drawing, and we try to help you out by presetting a lot of those settings based on the template. Heidi: Terrific. We do have a couple more questions in the queue now, but I did want to mention to everybody that we are very interested in your feedback regarding the Support WebCast program. If you have any comments about this session, other sessions you've seen in the past, general program comments, or any other sessions you'd like to see in the future, any topic suggestions, we do encourage you to send us your feedback. Send your feedback to feedback@microsoft.com. We do appreciate that feedback. Page 7 correction is the topic of the next question, and it is: What was the correction on page 7? It reads drawing level but the speaker said it was incorrect and I didn't catch the correct level. Cindy: It's actually the page level. For those who might be new to Visio, a drawing is actually the file you saved. So say, as an example, when you're working with Word there can be many pages. In Visio, it's the same and so it's not really impacting the whole entire drawing, it's just merely that particular page that you're working on at the time. Heidi: The next question is: You mentioned that some routing settings will be changed automatically if the shapes are moved far enough. How can I determine how far I can move the shapes without changing the settings? Cindy: Well, this is actually very complex and so a quick summary would be that, if you've moved the shapes in a way that violates the settings that you've chosen, they will automatically switch. And again, as I mentioned earlier, Never Reroute will never change, it's the Reroute On Crossover that will sometimes jump to a different setting. Like I said, this is a very complex topic and we actually would like to put some additional information out on the Web for people who want to understand this better. I can't guarantee anything, but we hope to have additional information in the form of possibly a Knowledge Base article sometime soon. Heidi: Next question is: I have Visio 2000 Enterprise edition. I noticed that Service Pack 1 is now available for Visio 2000 Standard, Technical, and Professional; however, Service Pack 1 does not specifically mention the Enterprise edition. Can I apply Service Pack 1 to Visio 2000 Enterprise? Cindy: SR1 is actually out for all four Visio editions. Typically, if you have purchased Visio recently, you're probably getting SR1; and you can tell the difference by looking at About Microsoft Visio in Help. It will say Microsoft Visio 2000. Earlier versions will say just Visio 2000. We hope to have a patch available on the Web shortly. And again, I do not have a date yet for that. But there is an SR1 for Enterprise. Heidi: Next question: What support is there for native AutoCAD drawing formats (.dwg)? And at what Microsoft Visio versions does that support appear? Cindy: Well, that's a little bit outside of the scope of the talk but I can certainly answer that. Visio Technical is the product that you want. Visio Enterprise also does have those capabilities and Visio Technical will bring in native .dwg format. Heidi: Next question: Where can I find more information on resources on layout and routing? Can I set layout and routing options programmatically? Cindy: The answer to the first question is, the best option for you right now is to look in online help. There is a lot of information on layout and routing, and the stuff that I went over today, a lot of the information was taken from online help. The developer help reference, which is also found under the Help menu, is useful for those who are wanting to use Visio programmatically. For those of you who know how to program with Visio, the layout and routing options are all set in the shape sheet when you change it using the user interface. So that information can be modified by putting information into the specific shape sheet cells. Heidi: With that question answered, we have cleared the queue of all of the questions that were submitted during today's event. Once again, we are very pleased that you joined us for today's session and we hope this Support WebCast was valuable for you. We are interested in your feedback. So once again, please send your feedback to feedback@microsoft.com. We hope that you join us again in the near future. Thank you and good-bye. |
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