Book Image

OmniGraffle 5 Diagramming Essentials

Book Image

OmniGraffle 5 Diagramming Essentials

Overview of this book

If a picture is worth a thousand words, why settle for anything less? Creating good visualizations to substantiate your ideas is essential in today's corporate environment. Use OmniGraffle's remarkably powerful and flexible features to get your diagrams right. Although fun to use, it can get cumbersome to find out exactly how to get what you want.This book will teach you how to make stunning diagrams without spending much time and energy. No matter if you have never used OmniGraffle, or if you are using it on a daily basis, this book will teach you how to get the most out of this splendid diagramming tool. It will first teach you the basics of the program and then extend your knowledge to a higher level.The book will teach you to make eye-popping visuals using a lot of useful, step-by-step examples. It begins with covering concepts that beef up your basics of using OmniGraffle. The earlier chapters will teach you to prepare dazzling diagrams from scratch with the many stencils, shapes, and fonts that are included in OmniGraffle. As your understanding of OmniGraffle broadens, the book will go even deeper to explain the less understood features of the software. It also covers some handy time-saving techniques such as workspaces and keyboard shortcuts.By the time you reach the end of this book, you will have mastered OmniGraffle to turn your ideas into diagrams.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
OmniGraffle 5 Diagramming Essentials
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
Preface
9
OmniGraffle workspaces
Index

Creating your own stencil


Making your own OmniGraffle stencil is nothing more than creating any other diagram.

Start by either using the File | New Resource | New Stencil menu command, or using the Action button found in the Stencil palette and execute the New Stencil command.

This will give you a new blank canvas. Notice that the title of the canvas contains the word Stencil.

Let's drag and drop shapes from other stencils so that we have our own Favorite Shapes stencil. This can be used to keep your often-used shapes.

Take the happy looking piggy bank from the Cash Flow stencil we used earlier, a few of the shapes in the Connection stencil (found in the Commons folder), add a few clouds and color these in various colors.

Save your stencils using the File | Save menu command (or use the ⌘+S keyboard shortcut command) as you would save any other OmniGraffle documents.

OmniGraffle will open the file-save dialog directly in the program's stencil disk folder.

After you have saved your new stencil...