Draw a line freehand…. yeah its gonna look bad

Select the Freeform tool from menu bar:

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

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

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

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):

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

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:

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. Designer or Engineer, Artist or Painter
3. Network Diagrams: Rotating Text on a Line
4. Network Diagrams: Tips for Printing from Visio
5. Network Diagrams:Zones on a diagram with Visio shape union
6. Network Diagrams: Drawing complex VLAN Networks with IP Addressing
7. Network Diagrams: Drawing Freehand Curves (and then fixing them) (This post)
8. Network Diagrams:Aligning Shapes
9. Network Diagrams:Locking the Background Shape
10. Network Diagrams: Labelling an VLAN/IP Segment
11. Network Diagrams: VLANs and IP Subnets
12. Network Diagrams: Drawing the Background Shape
13. On the Art of Network Diagrams and Presentation