Scott A. Helmers - Microsoft® Visio® 2010 Step by Step: The smart way to learn Microsoft Visio 2010-one step at a time! (Step by Step (Microsoft))

Copyright 2011 Scott A. Helmers

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Quick Shapes, AutoConnect, AutoAdd, AutoDelete, AutoAlign, AutoSize... just the names of some of the new and enhanced features in Visio 2010 suggest that creating diagrams will be simpler. A few examples include the following:

Visio 2010 also brings Live Preview to your diagrams. Many of the features listed above, along with most font, color, size, and style changes, take advantage of Live Preview to show you a potential change before you make it. Live Preview even extends to Visio , letting you preview the dynamic presentation of the data behind your shapes.

Many types of Visio diagrams contain sets of shapes that are related to each other. In previous Visio versions, you could visually suggest the relationships by creating some combination of groups, colored background shapes, or borders.

Visio 2010 introduces a new type of shape called a container that provides more than just a visual grouping for a set of shapes. The container structure means that shapes in a container know they are contained, and the container knows the members that reside within it. Consequently, when you move, copy, or delete a container, all of the members go with it. However, unlike a group shape, the member shapes are accessible with a single click just as if the container were not there.

In most containers, you can place member shapes wherever youd like. However, a list is a special type of container that maintains members in ordered sequence. Each list member knows exactly where it resides within the list.

Visio 2010 includes a third type of structured diagram component known as a callout . You still use new-style callouts to add annotations to other shapes, but both the callout and the target shape are aware of each other. Once again, this improves many user interface actions, but also allows Visio to work more intelligently with annotated shapes.

Containers, lists, and callouts are great for Visio users, but they also offer intriguing options to Visio developers for building location-aware shapes and for writing code that takes advantage of diagram structure.