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

Using Automatic layout


The Diagram Layout inspector controls how OmniGraffle automatically will layout hierarchical diagrams.

Within hierarchical diagrams there are certain relationships between the connected shapes. Some of the shapes have offspring; some shapes have the same ancestor and are thus siblings, and so on. At the end of this chapter you will make a genealogy diagram to teach you the coherence about ancestors, descendants, siblings, and so on.

It's when you are using tools like the Diagramming Tool, or using Mouseless Editing functionality (which you will learn about in the next section), that turning on automatic layout really make sense. Both these tools automatically create connections between shapes, and having OmniGraffle do the hard work with regards to automatically re-arranging shapes based on their relationship is a very nice time saver.

The Automatic layout checkbox toggles if automatic layout should be done or not.

You have access to four different layout methods...