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A brief detour from data: AutoConnect

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I thought I'd start off the New Year with a little break from the data features in Visio 12, and talk about one of the other areas we've been working on in the product as well. We are spending a lot of time on data, but are doing plenty of other features too! One of the things I hear from customers is that, while Visio allows them to draw things that they wouldn't have been able to create before, it's still a bit more complicated to use than it needs to be. Even something as basic as how you construct a diagram in Visio has quite a few steps. For example, let's look at how you would draw this flowchart in Visio:

To create this flowchart, you have to follow the same set of steps that you do with many of the different drawing types in Visio. You need to add the shapes to the diagram, arrange the shapes so that they are aligned and spaced correctly, and then you need to connect the different shapes together. Today in Visio, these are all three different operations. You drag and drop the shapes to add them to the diagram, then you would either eyeball the alignment or use any of the many alignment tools in Visio (such as "Align Shapes" in the Shapes menu). Finally you would switch to the connector tool and add the connectors. Quite a bit of work to get a basic diagram created, and the number of steps can be confusing for people starting out in Visio. The connector tool in particular is something that takes a while to figure out. Some people don't use it and end up just drawing lines instead of connectors between shapes. This looks fine until you decide to move shapes around, and then the lines don't follow the shapes!

In Visio 12, we took a look at the process of constructing a diagram and tried to figure out how it could be simplified. How can you create shapes, line them up, and connect them all at once? This resulted in a new feature we are calling AutoConnect. It's really a new way to draw in Visio and one of the things I'm most excited about in our new version.

How does AutoConnect work? When you are creating a drawing, you drag the first shape out like normal.  But when you drag the second shape out, you can drop it on one of the blue arrows that appears when you hover over the first shape:

Dropping the second shape on one of these arrows does the following: it adds the shape to the diagram, aligns and spaces it correctly, and connects it to the first shape. In one action you have accomplished the three steps needed to successfully add a shape to the diagram! This already makes things faster, but we also built a few other variations into AutoConnect to speed things up even more. First, once you have a shape selected in your shapes window, instead of dragging and dropping you can just click on the blue arrows to add a shape to the page:

Finally, imagine that you already have two shapes that are already on the page next to each other and want to connect them. Even if you used AutoConnect to add the shapes originally, you might have a loop in your process that requires you to add an additional connector to the page. If two shapes are next to each other, when you click on one of the blue AutoConnect arrows, we will connect them together:

Using AutoConnect can simplify the process of creating diagrams in Visio. Think of it as another tool in your arsenal for creating diagrams (though I find I tend to use it almost all of the time now). You can still use any other technique that worked for you before, either alone or in conjunction with AutoConnect. We're not doing anything to force you into using this model. Another thing I wanted to point out was that it's not just for flowcharts. Almost any type of diagram that involves connected shapes in Visio can be created using AutoConnect. For example, you could create a network diagram using the same technique.

We've worked on a number of features including AutoConnect that make the basics of creating and formatting diagrams faster and easier with Visio 12. I'll talk about a few more of them in later posts (as well as getting back to some more cool data features).

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 07, 2006
    This looks to be a great time saver. Another paradigm I've seen on other tools is the use of what I would call a "click-key" approach. In this method, you click on a shape in the diagram and press a key and it creates another shape (of the same type) and connects the shapes together. Kind of like a combo copy/paste/connect action with one click and one keystroke.

    Keep up the great work!

  • Anonymous
    January 09, 2006
    Eric,
    What a cool feature. I'd love to see more posts about the future of Visio, especially other features you might be adding or changing. The AutoConnect will be very useful. When I've trained people on how to use Visio for these simple diagrams, they get frustrated at the needless extra steps. One question: will I be able to add the AutoConnect feature to custom shapes? Will it work with both kinds of glue?

    Thanks for opening up your development process!
    -- Dan

  • Anonymous
    January 15, 2006
    Hi Dan,

    Thanks for the question. Yes, AutoConnect works with any shape, including custom shapes. Visio will use whatever is selected in the shapes window to create a new shape.

    It does, however, only use dynamic glue. This is the most flexible type of connection in Visio and allows for better results when people start moving shapes around.

    --Eric

  • Anonymous
    April 25, 2006
    Eric,
    Great Feature : Can I ask more about the "glue"?
    We use our own connectors in BPMN diagrams because we have data associated to the connector shape.

    Is it possible for the user , or better still the stencil, to nominate a connector to be used by the AutoConnect Process ?
    With such a feature our solution will be orders of magnitude stonger. Without it we will have some re-work / re-design to do, if we are to avoid our Visio 12 solution lagging behind.

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    May 23, 2006
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    June 08, 2006
    This is the fifth topic in a series discussing the essential features that make up the Visio application....

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    August 04, 2006
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    August 04, 2006
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    August 08, 2006
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