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

Summary


In this chapter, you learned about the building blocks that make up a diagram—shapes.

Shapes come in three types: Lines, Compound, and Text shapes. You learned that the text shape is just like any other compound shape. You also learned that if you group several shapes together, this group is considered to be a new (complex) compound shape.

You learned to change the appearance of compound shapes and the properties of lines. You also learned that the text shape is just a special version of the compound shape.

You learned about the time saving feature of using the favourite shape functions.

We also looked into Shape style properties, and learned that most of these can be applied to all kinds of shapes.

Grouping shapes is both time saving and pretty nifty—use this feature often and your diagramming becomes very efficient.

Adjusting shapes using only the mouse is fine and dandy, but often you'll need more control—this is where the Geometry property inspector comes into play.

What are diagrams...