Use SmartShapes

- [Instructor] Well, it's time now to close up whatever we're looking at here in Visio 2019 and start the process of creating our own diagram. If you were following along with me in the previous movie we looked at this file, SIWorkflow_final, this is what we're going to be building. We can close it up by going to the File tab and then clicking Close. No need to save any changes. Let's go back to File now to start a new diagram. With New selected you'll see all those same feature templates and headings for templates and sample diagrams we saw when we first launched Visio. We want to create a Basic Flowchart. Selecting this template actually gives us four different options for this type of diagram. The first option here in the top left quadrant is to start with a blank page, but we can get a headstart with top down diagrams, information tracking, process planning diagrams, structured prediction diagrams. Any of these other options will actually start a brand new flowchart for us and we can then manipulate those shapes if we want that type of headstart. We want to start from scratch, so we'll make sure this top left quadrant is selected before we click Create. It's going to give us a blank page and over here on the left hand side in the Shapes pane we have all of the stencils and shapes we need to create our basic flowchart. You may have noticed though that the page, although blank, is turned on its side, in other words the orientation is set by default to landscape. We need more height than width, so we need to change that by going to the Design tab. Over here on the left is the Orientation drop-down, give it a click and choose Portrait. Now we have exactly what we need, more height than width. Now it's time to start adding shapes. So let's zoom in a little bit. I'm going to use the plus sign down below, a couple of clicks to 60%. And scroll up using the scroll bar on the right here, so I can see the top of the page. This is where we want to start our diagram. And it all begins with a Start/End shape. Over here in the stencil for Basic Flowchart Shapes you can see Start/End. Click, drag it onto the page, and look what happens on the ruler at the top. You can see those little guides showing you where you are on the left, center, and right sides. Also on the left hand ruler as you move up and down you can see the same type of guide, so you can position this perfectly. There's also some built-in guides. Watch what happens when you move to the right towards the center of the page. Eventually you'll see a guide pop up telling you you're right in the middle. So let's go there and let's make sure that when we drag this down the top of our shape is lined up with the nine inch mark over there on the left hand ruler and release. Looks good. Now just click in the background to deselect. So we've added a shape. Another option is to get our Decision shape and drag it into the exact same spot below our Start/End shape and see some additional guides showing us not only our alignment to the page, but to the object above. And if we move close enough we'll see some spacing guides as well. That's it there, those double arrows pointing up and down tells us that's good spacing right there. We can release and we have our second shape. Click in the background to see that. But these are called smart shapes and they're called smart shapes for a reason. When you hover over a shape, like our very top shape here, the Start/End, you can see some arrows around the outside and when you hover over those you're going to see the top four shapes that happen to be the same four shapes we see over here in the top of our Basic Flowchart Shape stencil. So if we wanted to add shapes that way not only do they appear on the page, lined up and spaced properly, but connected as well. So we want to connect to our Decision shape here a process off to the right. So let's move to that right hand arrow. You'll see those top four shapes and now all we have to do is select the rectangle representing the Process shape. Give it a click. Click in the background and you'll see that we're well on our way. Now we have our Process shape, it's spaced and lined up nicely, and it has this little connection line with the arrow showing the direction. That's why it's called a smart shape. Now we can add another one to the other side of our Decision by going back to it. Just hover with your mouse, go to the left arrow, and choose Process again. This one though we want over here and down a little bit, so we'll just drag it down the page and release. You can see it stays connected, the line changes position, but it's still there. All right, if we want to move the connector we can do that. If we want to rearrange shapes we can do all of that and we will as we move through this chapter and subsequent chapters. Click in the background to deselect to see what we have so far. So we have some shapes that we simply click and drag onto the page, we have smart shapes by adding the shape from an existing shape. Not only do they space out and line up nicely, they also show up connected in the right direction.