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

Diagram Styles


So far you have been working with plain OmniGraffle documents. All the shapes have a distinct style—all the lines start with the same thickness and the font is set to Helvetica Regular.

These defaults are tied to which Diagram Style you are currently using. A Diagram Style has a definition for shapes, fonts, colors, and so on. The cool thing about a Diagram Style is that you can apply a style to an existing diagram.

If you take a look at the family tree diagram you created on the Norwegian Royal Family it's not very good looking. Everything is white and the lines are thin. Your work is not very appealing to look at.

However, fixing this is very easy.

Use the Format | Choose Diagram Styles menu command and you'll have access to a whole slew of ready-made styles from the Diagram Style Chooser.

Locate and select the style named Shiny, then click on the Apply button.

This may not be perfect—but it's a good start and you can work your way from here.

On the other hand this may not be...