Microsoft Visio 2010 : Managing and Styling Pages (part 1) - Inserting Pages

Now that you know how to create new drawings and find plenty of shapes to add to them, let’s look at how to create and manage pages themselves. Visio documents can contain multiple pages of different sizes, scales, and orientations. This capability is great for breaking up complex diagrams into simpler pieces or for keeping different types of diagrams together in a single project.

1. Inserting Pages

You might want to add pages to a Visio document for lots of reasons. Some projects require several different types of diagrams, and keeping them all in a single drawing file but on separate pages is convenient. For example, the drawings for a system installation project typically require a title page, several scaled plan and elevation views that show the site and actual views of real equipment, plus unscaled schematic and wiring diagrams that show how to hook everything up.

Other drawings are so complicated that it helps to break them down into overview and detailed views. Large organizational charts and complicated process flows benefit from using multiple pages to “drill down” in the hierarchy. For these diagrams, separate pages in a Visio document contain simplified high-level views and detailed low-level views.

Adding Pages Quickly

The fastest way to insert a new Visio page is to click the Insert Page tab on the right end of the page tab bar, as shown in Figure 1. If you use Microsoft Excel, this will be second nature for you.

When you click this tab, a new page is added to the end of your document. The new page has the same size, scale, and orientation as the active page. You therefore get a fresh copy of whichever page is showing but without any shapes.

On the Ribbon, the Blank Page button on the Insert tab also lets you add new pages. Figure 2 shows the Blank Page button with expanded choices.

Simply clicking the Blank Page button gives the same effect as clicking the Insert Page tab at the bottom of the window. Use the drop-down functionality for finer control.

Adding Pages with the Page Setup Dialog

As you become a more sophisticated Visio user, you might want more control over the pages you insert. The Page Setup dialog offers many options for specifying the name, size, scale, measuring units, layout settings, and more.

To access the Page Setup dialog, right-click a page tab for an existing page and then choose Insert. The Page Setup dialog opens, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. The Page Setup dialog gives you full control over new pages, as well as existing pages. Note that this dialog has six different tabs.

Notice that the Page Setup dialog box has six different tabs. Clearly, adding a page using this method offers a lot of control over many aspects of the new page. Page Setup can be used to fine-tune existing pages as well. Just right-click a page tab for an existing page and choose Page Setup (see Figure 3).

Adding and Manipulating New Pages