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

Editing magnets using the Magnet Tool


In Chapter 1 you added magnets to shapes in your first diagram. In Chapter 3, you learned about the Connection Property palette. You learned to add a set of predefined magnets to your shapes using the choices in the Connection property inspector.

Magnets are a great way to control exactly where the connection lines will attach to your shapes. For everyday use, the predefined magnet setups found in the Connection property inspector may be more than adequate for you.

But what if you need to change the location of the magnets? What if you create a completely new shape and you need to add magnets on your preferred points? What if you import some graphics (that is, clip-art) and you want to add magnets to the graphics?

This is where the Magnet Tool comes into play. The Magnet Tool lets you control exactly where the magnets are placed on a shape.

If a shape has no magnets—connection lines may be not placed where you want them to be.

The Magnet Tool can do three...