Understanding brainstorming diagram structure

- In this chapter, we're going to shift our focus to another type of diagram you can create here in Visio 2016 that also uses a hierarchy like our Org chart did in the previous chapter. It's called a Brainstorming Diagram. So we'll click File, and from here, we'll select Categories because we're going back to the Business category to find Brainstorming Diagram. Now, many people think this is likely not a popular type of diagram, but in effect, we don't need to just use it for brainstorming ideas.

It can be used for multiple different scenarios. So let's give it a click, and click Create with US Units selected to start our brand-new Brainstorming Diagram. It looks a little bit different than other diagrams. For example, there aren't that many shapes over here in the Shapes pane with Brainstorming Shapes selected. Another thing that happens besides our blank page in the background is we get an outline window showing up. And because we haven't saved our drawing or diagram yet, it just says "Drawing10" at the top.

That's the number that appears after mine. You may see a different number. It depends on how many new diagrams you've created so far since launching Visio. All right, so we're ready to start adding things, and it's a simple matter, again, of clicking and dragging a shape onto our page. Let's go to Main topic because we are going to be creating a hierarchy that has a main topic at the top that goes down to subtopics which can also have subtopics, and so on, so let's drag our Main topic right into the center.

And when you see those guidelines, those dynamic guides, show you where the center is, just release, and you have your Main Topic. Look what's happening here in our outline window. We have our Main Topic. It's titled, Main Topic. We need to change that. Unlike a shape in an Org chart, we don't go in here and double-click. You don't need to. Just start typing. How about "Ways to improve "customer experience," like so? All right, now we can click in the background, and you can see we have our labeled Main Topic.

It now shows up here in our outline, and it does look like it's getting too close to the edges of this shape. So let's go to the shape, give it a click, and we're going to stretch it out. Let's go to a corner to resize the shape, both horizontally and vertically. Can click and drag out and down until everything fits neatly. And now, we can take this and move it around until we're back at the center here of our page. And it doesn't have to be perfect right now. We can fix that up a little bit later.

So right there is about 5 1/2. I like it there. Okay. We can click in the background to deselect, and we're ready now to start adding the next level, which would be a subtopic. We'll talk about that next.