The Task pane

All right, just before we start working with actual drawings in Visio 2007 here or creating your own drawings, we are going to continue on the theme of just getting you familiarized with your surroundings. Something I would like to talk to you about now is called the Task Pane. And the Task Pane is kind of context sensitive, it's going to show up over here on the right hand side of your screen but depending on what you are doing with a drawing, the Task Pane is going to show you different options. Now to have the Task Pane appear on your screen, there is a couple of different ways to do that. You can do it manually by going up to the View menu and then clicking on Task Pane or by the keyboard holding down Ctrl and pressing function key 1 (F1). That's one way.

I am not going to turn it on quite yet, so I will just click out here in the gray space. Another way is, it will automatically launch depending on what you are doing. For example, if you are working on an org chart and you want to have a nice color combination or a theme as we would call it, you might go up to the Theme button up here on the Formatting toolbar and then the Task Pane shows up with some options for you. So before we launch this Task Pane I am talking about, let's just go up to the very first button on your Standard toolbar here, the New button, and give it a click.

So whatever the default is, it shows up here, we have got a blank drawing about to be created here. Now if I want the Task Pane to show up, like I said, I could start working on various parts of my drawing and it may show up by default or I can go up to the View menu. Let's do it now, click View, and then we will click on Task Pane. So you can see it squeezes my drawing over here to the left and now by default for me, I am looking at Theme - Colors and down below you can see I have got built-in color schemes, basically. So if I was working on a diagram, I could simply click on one of these themes to have those colors applied to my drawing, a really nice shortcut.

I have also got Theme Effects down here if I wanted to use that. So different effects like shadows and borders and so on. Now I have also got a dropdown up here where it says now Theme - Effects. I can click that dropdown, there is Colors, I have got Data Graphics, I have got the Reviewing Task Pane. So if I click on Reviewing, for example, this is where if I was marking up a diagram and sending it off to somebody with feedback or requesting their feedback and they would go in and add their two cents. I would get it back all marked up and this is the Reviewing Task Pane that I would use to show those markups and either accept them or reject them and so on.

If I go to this dropdown you will see there is some other choices, there is a Clip Art Task Pane. Research, if I am going to be working with, for example, the Speller, Thesaurus, I want to look up words, that kind of thing. If I am managing documents and I have got an outside source, for example, I have got Document Management system, I have got Document Management, Updates and Conflicts here as well. So these will sometimes just show up by default depending on what we are doing in our diagram, but it's good to know that you can always close it when you don't want it by clicking the Close button and if you do want it and it's not there, you can always go to View and click on Task Pane or from the keyboard, remember, you have got Ctrl+F1 as well.

All right, I am just going to close up my Task Pane, I am going to close this diagram that I have started. I haven't actually done anything so it doesn't ask me to save anything and I am back where I started at the beginning of this lesson. Next, we are going to look at manipulating your toolbars and your menus to be exactly the way you need them to be to work efficiently in Visio.