Saving Visio documents

All right just before we jump in to creating your own diagrams in Visio. You will need to understand a little bit of saving your work. Obviously when you start creating a diagram, you are going to need to save that work so that you can go back to it to work on it so you can share it with others, print it etcetera. So if you don't want to lose your work, you need to know how to save it. But there is also the option of saving it under different format, not everybody has Visio installed on their computers. So if you wanted to send a diagram to someone who didn't have Visio, you want to save it to a format that they would be able to open it up.

So that's what we are going to talk about here saving and saving as. Of course we are going to need something to save. So let's go to our Open button up here click Open and you will navigate to the Lesson 1 folder of your exercise files here. Now depending on if you followed along with us in the previous lesson or not your view maybe different. Let's get all on the same page, we will go to Views here click the drop down and let's go to List. I will click on List. All right we will go back to our BasicDiagram1a give that a click and click Open.

All right so we have got our BasicDiagram open. Let's say we have been working on this and we make a couple of changes like. We change upto some colors or something. I am going to click on this box right up here and I am going to come up here and change the border color. I am going to change it to Black. Okay so I click over here and I can see I have got a darker border here. Now I would want to save that change or if I to close this up without saving and I would lose that change and I have to do it again the next time. So the easiest way to save is just to hit your Save button right here.

Notice that as I hover over that it says in bracket Ctrl+S keyboard shortcut is our other way to save this quickly Ctrl+S on the keyboard is the shortcut for saving. And when we save this way all we do is we update our changes and continue working on the diagram. Now like I said earlier we may want to share this with somebody who doesn't have Visio, and in that case we would want to use Save As. Another scenario might be we want to save it to a different location because when we hit the Save button here, all we are doing is updating our changes, keeping the same name BasicDiagram1a and it's staying in the same location where we saved it the first time.

So if we want to change any of that change the name, the location the format we need Save As and we need to go to the File menu to get there. So we click File and we come down to Save As. So we click Save As you can see we have got the Save As dialog box, the current name is BasicDiagram1a and if I is to hit Save right now, it would ask me, do I want to replace the old version with the new and the answer would be Yes, but here is where I can change it to for example BasicDiagram1b and since I do that I will have the second version of the diagram.

Down below you can see I have got a Save As type as well. So the Save as type is set to Drawing. This is a Visio drawing and if I click this drop down wow. I have got all kinds of options here. I could save this as stencil, a template so I could use it over and over again. An XML drawing or stencil or template. There is Visio but older versions of Visio. So, if I was giving this to someone who doesn't have the latest version of Visio. I could save it to old version like 2002 here and they would be able to open it. You can see I can save it to a Vector Graphic Scalable SVG, AutoCAD Drawings to a web page if I want it to.

I can even save it as a graphic image. So down here you can see we have got enhanced metafiles we have got GIFs, graphics interchange format you are getting the full length version here of some of the things you probably heard before like GIFs and JPEG. There is JPEG right down there. Windows Bitmap is another graphic format. So all kinds of choices to save this to a different format if I wanted to, to share it with someone else. Or maybe I just want to save it as a picture and know that no one is going to be able to edit this. It's going to be called BasicDiagram 1b with the .JPG on the end for JPEG.

The other option would be to save it somewhere else. Now by default we are still in the Lesson 1 folder of our exercise files but if I want to Save it somewhere else like my desktop I could click Desktop right here. Or to my Pictures folder I click right here and I would save it in my Pictures folder and of course if I want to save it somewhere else totally different I can click on More and I can go to various Searches, go to the Public folder. I can come down here. I can go to Organize if I want to and create a New Folder to Save it in.

I can come up here and move through the various folders. Right now I am in pictures. I want to go back one I can click it use the backarrow to go back to Pictures where I was and this is where I am going to save it then I am going to call it something different BasicDiagram1b, a new format, a JPEG format. So I had lots to choose from and a new location right here called Pictures. So when I hit Save, the changes will be made when I make a few selections from my JPEG Output Options dialog. I can take all of the defaults here, but you can see there is a number of defaults that can be changed like Color Format, any Rotation.

The resolution for Screen, Print, or Custom Resolution, if I wanted to. Is the Size going to be suitable for viewing on a Screen or to be printed out or do I want something Custom here as well. So selecting a radial button changes that. Background color, you can see is set to white by default. I can flip it, once I have got all of those selections made I click OK and I have actually now saved my diagram as a different format. So I have got that picture down, sitting in my Pictures folder.

So when I go up to File and Open or to click the Open button and I go to Pictures, you will notice I don't see anything, why, it's looking for Visio files right now. I click on the drop down here and you can see I have got lots of choices including JPEG and I click there, there is my BasicDiagram and I could bring that into a drawing for example, if I wanted to. So a drawing within a drawing. I am going to hit Cancel and hopefully that gives you good idea of now the difference between Save and Save As, first of all and when you would use Save As.

We use Save As here to Save it to a different format to a different location with a different name. You may or may not need to adjust all three of those options but Save As is the way to go to change any one or all of them.