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

Canvas layers


A layer can be defined as a transparent surface upon which you can draw one or more shapes. These shapes are thus associated with their corresponding layer. All canvases in OmniGraffle have at least one layer.

Think of a layer as a transparent plastic sheet where you draw with a pen. If you now visualize that you can put another transparent plastic sheet over the first one—and draw on this second sheet—then you'll have the concept of how canvas layers behave.

Let's say you have a diagram of your new company office. The bottom layer will then have the outer walls. You could the have a layer on the top of this outlining each office cubicle, a layer with the electrical wiring, a layer with air conditioning ducts, and so on. Then you could have yet another layer with the office furniture in place.

So if you wanted to show only the electrical wiring—you hide the layers with the office cubicles, the office furniture, the air conditioning ducts, and so on. Then, if you need to show...