The Visio Toolbars
The toolbars provide shortcut icons to access frequently used tools. We won’t review every toolbar icon right now – it would be redundant – as later we will highlight the toolbar icons as we teach you how to perform a task. You can add and remove specific toolbar icons to customize these menus.
Adding and Removing Toolbar Icons
On each toolbar, there is an add/remove arrow 
and when you click on it, you get additional options to add or remove buttons from the toolbar:
You can change your toolbar to use only the buttons you frequently access and remove ones you do not access. We typically just use the preset options, but Microsoft Visio gives you the power to customize the interface to your liking.
Adding and Removing Toolbars
Not only can you customize each toolbar, but there are a variety of toolbars you can add to the top. If you right-click in a blank area to the right of the existing toolbars, you will see a menu with all of the different toolbars available to you:
As you can see, there are a number of toolbars available to give you commands at the click of your mouse. Some of these toolbars automatically appear when you insert certain objects or perform certain actions. This context sensitive interface is helpful when screen real estate is at a premium, e.g. when your monitor is not very big!
The Shapes Panel
The Shapes panel is the area of your window which has the shapes you can use in your drawing. There are a number of templates you can use when creating a new drawing in Visio and this will determine which shapes show up in the Shapes panel by default. For example, if you were creating an Active Directory diagram, the Shapes panel will look like this:
When you’re creating your drawing, you will select shapes from the Shapes panel and drag and drop them into your Visio drawing.
The Drawing Page
The drawing page is where all the magic happens. This is your slate to make your illustration appear – to create the drawing will make a complex topic simple and easy to understand, to document a diagram, or to create a process flow and see how business really happens in your organization. The drawing page is where you connect objects together to show relationships and where you take a normally complex engineering diagram and break it down into an understandable illustration. Here’s what a engineering diagram might look like on the drawing page:
You can insert multiple drawing pages into one Visio file, allowing you create multiple page, complex drawings in a single file.
Microsoft Visio Task Pane
The Microsoft Visio Task Pane is a context sensitive area of the application interface that enables you to access frequently used tools or options while working in Visio. You can access the Task Pane by clicking the View menu and selecting Task Pane or by press Ctrl+F1 on your keyboard.
When you’re working on a drawing, the task pane defaults to Theme – Colors, though you can change it by clicking the down arrow to the right of the title, which will show you these options:
In many of the Microsoft Office applications, we find the task pane to be immensely useful when working on documents. In Visio, not so much. It seems to be an after thought and not much thought went into making the task pane a must have in Visio. We generally just leave it turned off.
In the Next Section
In the next section of the free Microsoft Visio 2007 tutorial, we will explore creating a new Visio drawing.
