23rd May 2012

Network Diagrams: Drawing Freehand Curves (and Then Fixing Them)

Draw a line freehand…. yeah its gonna look bad

Select the Freeform tool from menu bar:

net-diag-freeform-1.jpg

Make your best attempt at drawing a nice curve while using a mouse. Yeah, right, drawing with a mouse is specialist skill ….

net-diag-freeform-2.jpg

Now try to get it as close as possible to the connection point on the object on the right.

net-diag-freeform-3.jpg

So now you have a line that looks something like this:

net-diag-freeform-4.jpg

Deleting Freeform points

The line has a number of green dots with crosses. Lets delete the points on the line that are causing it to deviate. Position your cursor over the a point and click to select (the cursor will change to crosshairs when you are above the point):

net-diag-freeform-5.jpg

And now press the delete key to remove the point. Visio will recalculate the Bezier curve and straighten it up.

net-diag-freeform-6.jpg

Lets move some points around

So our line isn’t quite in the shape that we want. We can select and move the points around until the line is in the shape that we want:

net-diag-freeform-7.jpg
net-diag-freeform-8.jpg

Wrap Up

And now you have a proper looking line. The freehand tool has a couple of other possibilities that can make it even more useful and I think I will save them for another blog post.

Other posts in the series

  1. Colour Blindness, Network Diagrams and Reliability
  2. Network Diagrams: Rotating Text on a Line
  3. Network Diagrams: Tips for Printing from Visio
  4. Network Diagrams:Zones on a diagram with Visio shape union
  5. Network Diagrams: Drawing complex VLAN Networks with IP Addressing
  6. Network Diagrams: Drawing Freehand Curves (and then fixing them) (This post)
  7. Network Diagrams:Aligning Shapes
  8. Network Diagrams:Locking the Background Shape
  9. Network Diagrams: Labelling an VLAN/IP Segment
  10. Network Diagrams: VLANs and IP Subnets
  11. Network Diagrams: Drawing the Background Shape
This post is copyright of Thropos Ltd ©2008-2011 at Etherealmind.com - contact | email: greg.ferro@packetpushers.net - twitter: @etherealmind | All rights reserved
About Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus

  • Mike

    Not sure I get the point? Why not just use a curved connector?

    Mike

    • http://etherealmind.com Greg Ferro

      Curved Connectors are fixed shape and you can’t control where they go. Sometimes you need to go around things in a very large network diagram and this is the right tool to use in that case.

  • shef

    Greg, as I know, you use Mac. How you use Visio in such case? You have dual-boot configuration?

    • MrPaul

      He probably uses parallels, vmware, bootcamp, or some other virtualization software.

    • http://etherealmind.com Greg Ferro

      MrPaul is correct. I use Parallels for emulation. I tried Vmware but didn’t like it so much. I think Parallels is faster and doesn’t crash so much.