Monday, March 15, 2010

Network Diagrams:Aligning Shapes

March 12, 2009 by Greg Ferro · 2 Comments 

This Post is Part of a Series — click for list on Network Diagrams»

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:

net-diagram-align-shape-1.jpg

Now lets align these shapes hori­zont­ally using Shapes, Align Shapes:

net-diagram-align-shape-2.jpg

Select the centre on middles. Most of the options here should be obvious.

net-diagram-align-shape-3.jpg

And now we have a straight line of serv­ers. I think this is a good rep­res­ent­a­tion of a server farm.

net-diagram-align-shape-4.jpg

Other Shapes

The shapes do not have to be identical of course:

net-diagram-align-shape-5.jpg

will become:

net-diagram-align-shape-6.jpg

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.

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Comments

2 Responses to “Network Diagrams:Aligning Shapes”
  1. Ed says:

    Great post…just learned some­thing new about Visio. Thx!

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