2 September 2010

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.

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About Greg Ferro
Greg is a Network and Security Architect / Designer / Engineer working freelance in the UK and worked for Resellers, DotCom's, Large Corporate's and Service Providers across a variety of products & Vendors. He prefers to work for end users, believes in the life cycle, total cost of ownership and that near enough is often good enough. He likes talking about himself in the first person to feel "royal", even when hosting the Packet Pushers Podcast on Data Networking. More about Greg at http://etherealmind.com/who-am-i/ and you can follow him on Twitter.

Comments

  1. Mike says:

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

    Mike

    • Greg Ferro says:

      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.

  2. shef says:

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

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