Browsing sample drawings

All right, in the last lesson when we launched Visio from the Start button we saw that Getting Started screen and it was broken up into three areas if you recall. Now if you've skipped to this lesson, no problem, we'll just do a quick review. But the Getting Started pane that shows up when we first launch Visio has something called Sample Drawings in there. Now samples which went missing in version 2003 and are back again in 2007, are different from templates. Samples are actual drawings that have been created and include the data that feeds into those drawings, and you've got access to them.

But if you've skipped by the Getting Started screen and now you're here in Visio and you've got this blank screen in front of you, how do you get to those samples again? Well, here's a way. Let's go up to the File menu, and you give it a click. Now if you come down to New, you'll notice it does have one of those little black arrows next to it, and over to the right is Getting Started. Now we also have those templates down below. We can create new drawings, new drawings from the template, and then we can access from various categories, a number of templates are built into those categories, for example, under Business you can see we've got Audit Diagrams and Flowcharts and Brainstorming Diagrams etcetera, it's kind of related to business.

We've got an Engineering category, Flowchart all the way down to Software and Database. But to get those samples I was talking about we need to go back up to Getting Started and click there. So this is what we see when we launch Visio for the first time. So if we were to close this up right now and start it up again, this is the screen we see Getting Started with Microsoft Office Visio. What I wanted to show you is what's over here on the left-hand side. Now above all of those template categories we just saw, we've also got Samples, and if I click on Samples, you'll see over here that I've got different kinds of sample diagrams, I've got IT Asset Management, Process Improvement, Project Management, a Sales Summary and a Project Timeline.

Each of these samples has data that feeds into those diagrams to make them look the way they do. So for example, with IT Asset Management selected over here, we get a brief overview on the right-hand side of what this is, so we use it to track network health and statistics using up-to-date information in an Excel spreadsheet. So there is information in a spreadsheet that feeds this diagram to make it look the way it does. Now I have some options down below, first of all, the units I want to work in, US units like inches, feet, yards, etcetera, or I can go Metric if I prefer millimeters, centimeters and meters, for example.

My two buttons down below are to open the Sample Data and open the Diagram. Now when we open a diagram, we're going to see that sample data as well. But if just want to work on the data, I could do that through here. As I click on the other samples here like Process Improvement for example, I also get a description on the right-hand side and those same options for opening the diagram and the sample data. Same goes for Project Management, a Project Timeline, and a Sales Summary, and you can see this is going to use something called a Pivot Diagram.

We will get into pivot diagrams a little bit later. It looks like the Sales Summary is using a pivot diagram to evaluate the sales pipeline and current sales right at a glance. If I go to Project Management, this is also going to make use of a Pivot Diagram, but it's a different sample. So I am going to go over here to Project Timeline. I am going to make sure US units is selected, and I am going to click Open Diagram. So you'll see what actually opens here is the diagram itself. Now it's kind of hard to read because we're zoomed so far out. And it's small because the bottom half of this part of the screen also includes the sampled data and this is just like a spreadsheet.

It's my movies column so you can read what's in them. You can see I've got data in here under the Task Name column. The Duration, when it starts when it finishes, all the information I need in a good Timeline. All right, on the left-hand side, I have also got under the Shapes heading here a number of stencils. So backgrounds, borders and titles, and then Timeline shapes appear down here, all of those shapes I might want to use when creating a Timeline. So if I wanted to update this, I've got all of the shapes down here including dividers and milestones and so on.

Okay, now these borders can be adjusted. I am just going to come down here until I see the double arrow. I'll just click-and-drag this down, I don't need to see that much. You can see this starts to grow a little bit as I create more space for it. Of course, we've got zoom levels and so on that we can use to look at the data, but that's not the purpose of this particular lesson. I just wanted you to know that there are sample diagrams in there with sample data if you wanted to grab a head-start. So if you're going to be creating a Timeline for the first time ever, you might want to grab this sample, just come in here, edit the data, for example, so the task names would change for you.

So you would edit those, change their durations, if you wanted start and finish times like you need in the Timeline you could edit those. If there is information you didn't need, you can take out columns and remove information. So it's just a great way to get a head-start in creating a diagram in Microsoft Office Visio. When we're done with our diagram, we can simply close it by coming up to this small x underneath the Close button that will close the application. This is the one that closes our diagram, and that brings us back to where we started.

So just so you know all those samples are back, we've got them in Visio 2007, and if you need a head-start, don't forget to go in there, under Getting Started click that Samples folder and grab the sample you need to get you going.