From the course: Visio 2016 Essential Training

How adding SmartShapes can create layers

From the course: Visio 2016 Essential Training

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How adding SmartShapes can create layers

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- Here in Visio 2016, many people don't realize you're automatically working with layers. The diagrams you create, and the smart shapes you use, the connectors, automatically create layers in the background, and layers can be very useful. If you've ever used a computer-aided design program, for example, you know how certain items placed on their own layers allow you to do things like hide them, choose not to print them or print them, to allow certain settings to be applied to certain layers and not others. Well, it's very similar here in Visio, and this chapter's all about working with layers. We're going to start with creating new layers by simply adding smart shapes. Now, with the Home tab selected, go up to the top right-hand side of the ribbon and click the Layers drop-down, from here is where you can access Layer Properties. Notice that objects can also be assigned to layers. It's not selectable right now because we don't have any objects selected, but when we click Layer Properties, you're going to see the number of layers with their name down the left-hand column, and then the options that can be turned on and off. Currently there are no layers, all we have is our page with our title. We could create a new layer from here, but let's click Cancel and instead, look what happens when we start to create a drawing. We'll go over here to our shapes pane and grab the process shape. We'll drag it up to around the top of our drawing, and in the center as well. So as soon as we get it around the middle here, we can release. There's our first shape, and if we go up to the layers drop-down and give it a click and click Layer Properties. Check it out, there is a new layer called Flowchart because we grabbed a Flowchart shape. You can see it is visible, it can be printed. We have other checkboxes, though, for making it the active layer or inactive. You can see there's a Lock option, so we can lock out layers so they don't get messed up, there's Snap and Glue settings applied to this layer, we can even change color if we wanted to. But all we're going to do is click Cancel and continue on. Let's move to the shape that's selected and when you see those little arrows pop up, we'll go to the one below, shows our top four. We'll go to another process shape, give it a click, and we just added a second shape, but we've also added the connector automatically. Click in the background, you can see it. All right, let's double-click in the first box, we'll double-click there so we can type in something like, Begin with the pre-test, and we'll double-click in the shape down below, and from there, Take the pre-test, and we have our two shapes and our connector. Let's go up to the Layers drop-down, give it a click and click Layer Properties. Check it out, we now have two layers, one called Flowchart, and it now has two items on it, that's the two process shapes, but we also have a new layer called Connector, and it has one object, that's the connector between the two shapes. So if we didn't want to see connectors we could click the Visible checkbox, click Apply, move this out of the way to check out in the background. We don't see the connector, that's because the layer is invisible. You can turn it back on, click Apply, and we get to see that layer. Think of the old overhead projectors, and we use those acetate films that we would lay one on top of the other to create the finished product. It's very similar here working with layers. So we'll click OK to close up this window, we'll keep our diagram here as we continue on. I just wanted you to see how working with different types of objects like shapes and connectors automatically create layers.

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