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

Grouping shapes


When working with diagrams, you will often encounter the possibility that several shapes belong together as a group and that you would like to work on these shapes like they were one complex shape. This is possible with OmniGraffle; you can group shapes together to become a single shape.

If you have used corresponding group functionality from other software titles, you may have become annoyed that you must ungroup your shape groups—change one shape—and then regroup your shapes again. With OmniGraffle you do not need to be annoyed anymore. In fact, you can change just one shape in a group of shapes. This is pretty cool and a great time saver.

You can also apply style formatting like color fill, thickness of strokes, font formatting, and so on to the whole group. When you do this, every shape in the group will inherit this new style.

Creating a group of shapes

A group of shapes must have two or more shapes. These shapes can be placed anywhere on the canvas. The shapes can even...