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

Aligning shapes to each other


You will sooner or later need to quickly align a series of shapes. OmniGraffle has several ways of doing this.

Start by placing a few shapes randomly on the canvas.

From the Arrange | Align menu, you have several choices on how you want to align your shapes. It is also possible to right-click and get a context sensitive menu appearing with the various alignment choices.

Most of the same choices are also available from the Canvas: Alignment inspector.

However, there are a few extra choices available like offsetting shapes either vertically or horizontally.

The behavior of the Alignment buttons is controlled by the Point of Alignment matrix.

The Alignment buttons may thus be used to align shapes to the lower-right corner, or to the center-bottom of the shapes it is all controlled by the active point (blue) in the Point of Alignment matrix.

You will find a sub-set of the alignment options in the Arrange | Align menu, this also holds true for the context sensitive...