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

Ordering shapes


To get your diagram to look exactly as you want, you may need to reorder your shapes. One way to do the reordering is via the canvas layers. This will become very tedious if you have a big diagram, also best practises regarding canvas layers are to stick conceptually equal shapes on the same layer.

This section will teach you to reorder shapes within the same layer.

Start with three shapes drawn in the following sequence: Square, Circle, and Cloud. Let the Circle overlap the Square and let the Cloud partly cover both the Square and the Circle. Inside the square, write 1, inside the Circle write 2, and inside the Cloud write 3. These numbers indicate in which sequence the shapes where created.

What you have done here is for each new shape you draw, the shape will be put on top of the other shapes. If you never draw overlapping shapes, you may not have noticed this at all.

If you try to drag the circle in and out of the group of shapes, it will still be sandwiched between the...