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

Differences from other software


Some literature on other diagramming tools quite often calls lines one dimensional shapes, and compound shapes two dimensional shapes. Some books even operate with a third dimension (for the cylinders you used in the income flow diagram in Chapter 2, Stencils). On top of the dimensions, you can have open and closed shapes. It might sound very impressive or important to have these distinctions but in the end your result will be a diagram.

Even if OmniGraffle does not complicate its jargon by using dimensions or open or closed shapes, the results are often more stunning to look at compared to other diagramming software.

Note

If you have been using Microsoft Visio on a Windows platform, you should know that none of the shapes in OmniGraffle (version 5) are, at the time of writing this book, intelligent shapes the way Visio defines this.