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 shapes the easy way


A fancy way of saying what you are now going to learn is called binary or Boolean, operation on shapes. When something is binary it can be either on or off. What this section will teach you is that you can create new shapes by either adding new parts to a shape, or removing existing parts from a shape.

This method works by using a set of basic shapes (circles, oblongs, triangles, and so on) and the combining of these into new shapes. We are not talking about simply grouping shapes here—but creating new shapes from the bottom up.

In the Edit | Shapes menu there are four commands which will aid you in creating a new shape.

The Subtract Shapes menu command

As the name implies, the Subtract Shapes menu command will create a new shape that is based on two or more shapes subtracted from each other.

Start by creating two shapes: One square and one circle. The circle should be put on top of the rectangle.

Select both shapes and issue the Edit | Shapes | Subtract...