Microsoft Visio 2007

Resizing Shapes in Visio

Want a shape bigger? No problem! Need to make it smaller to show relevance to the rest of the drawing? Easy to do! Resizing a shape in Microsoft Visio is very easy. Resizing objects allows you to illustrate the importance of items within a drawing. We’re going to use the Visio brainstorm we just created and resize some of the objects.

1. Open the Visio brainstorming vsd file we created in the previous lesson, or the one you downloaded.
2. Click on the New Website shape.
   
3. Click on one of the green resize circles, hold the mouse button, and drag it to resize the object.
   
4. The connector lines move to make room for the new sized object.

You can repeat this process with any shape – resizing it bigger or smaller.

Deleting a Shape

You may find after you add a shape to your Visio drawing that it isn’t the right shape, or not the right one for right now. You can delete any shape on the page very easily.

1. Open the Visio brainstorming drawing. You can download it here – we’re using the same from the previous exercise.
2. Select the Fast to produce shape. Press the DEL key. Alternatively, click the Edit menu and select clear.
3. The Fast to produce shape is removed from the drawing.

Positioning and Aligning Shapes

You want your Visio drawing to look as clean and crisp as you can. It could take you a long time to manually line up and position objects on your drawing. Fortunately, Microsoft Visio includes tools to position and align your shapes so they look very professional. Let’s start by creating a new workflow diagram.

1. Click new and select Business and then Work Flow Diagram.
2. Drag and drop the Information services shape onto the drawing.
3. Drag a Management shape onto the drop and connect arrow of the Information services shape.
   
4. You now have two shapes on your work flow diagram. Let’s add a Marketing shape to the drawing to the right of the Information services shape, but not connected to anything. Your drawing should look something like this:
   
5. Now add two more shapes to the right of the new one you added and purposefully make them out of alignment.
   
6. Select all of the top objects by clicking in an open area, hold down the mouse button, and then drag the cursor to select the top four shapes.
7. Click on the Shape menu. Select Align Shapes.
   
8. Select your desired alignment, we’re going to align top vertically. Click OK.
   
9. Now your shapes are aligned.