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

Connecting shapes


In Chapter 1, you learned how to connect two compound shapes using the line shape. You even changed the way the shapes connected to each other by changing the Connection property palette.

Let us examine the various connection properties for shapes available in OmniGraffle. The Connection property inspector handles connection settings for shapes (line shapes, compound shapes and the text shape), groups and tables. For more information on tables, see Chapter 5, More on Editing Diagrams.

The Allow connections from lines checkbox controls if the connection lines will "stick" to the shape.

If you allow connections from lines, the connector line will always be attached to the shape, even if you move the shape around the canvas.

If you do not enable this checkbox, you can still draw a line to the shape—the line may look like it's connected to the shape, but as soon as you move the shape the connection line will not follow the shape.

These settings handle the Group and...