There are times in a diagram when you create a number of shapes that must line up, exactly, so that they “look proper”. Visio has a tool that does it exactly right.
Align a row of servers
Lets diagram a number of servers as you see them in a serverfarm. Drag a server onto the page and then “duplicate” it with the Ctrl-D keyboard shortcut. You may have to move it to the right a bit so it doesn’t overlap – it shoudl look approximately like this:
Now lets align these shapes horizontally using Shapes, Align Shapes:
Select the centre on middles. Most of the options here should be obvious.
And now we have a straight line of servers. I think this is a good representation of a server farm.
Other Shapes
The shapes do not have to be identical of course:
will become:
Caveats
If you decide to group shapes together, then the center that is used may not be where you expect. This means that you may have to ungroup shapes to align them correctly.
Other posts in the series
- Colour Blindness, Network Diagrams and Reliability
- Designer or Engineer, Artist or Painter
- Network Diagrams: Rotating Text on a Line
- Network Diagrams: Tips for Printing from Visio
- Network Diagrams:Zones on a diagram with Visio shape union
- Network Diagrams: Drawing complex VLAN Networks with IP Addressing
- Network Diagrams: Drawing Freehand Curves (and then fixing them)
- Network Diagrams:Aligning Shapes (This post)
- Network Diagrams:Locking the Background Shape
- Network Diagrams: Labelling an VLAN/IP Segment
- Network Diagrams: VLANs and IP Subnets
- Network Diagrams: Drawing the Background Shape
- On the Art of Network Diagrams and Presentation
