Microsoft Visio 2010 : Managing and Styling Pages (part 2) - Working with Background Pages, Inserting Backgrounds, Titles, and Borders

2. Working with Background Pages

Background pages are special pages whose content shows on foreground pages but can’t be edited from the foreground. Because background pages can be shared by multiple foreground pages, they can save you a lot of work and make your documents more efficient. Common elements can be shared by many pages, and updated in only one place!

A common use for background pages is for holding titles, borders, and background art for an entire document.

Adding Background Pages Using Borders and Titles

1.	Create a new drawing, either blank from a template or from a sample drawing.
2.	Drop or draw a few shapes on the default page.
3.	Click the Design tab.
4.	In the Backgrounds group, select a background from the Backgrounds gallery. Notice that you now have background graphics, and a new page tab has been inserted: VBackground-1 (see Figure 4). The name of the new page appears in italic, and is at the right end of the page tabs, two clues that a page is a background. Figure 4. Inserting the World background creates a new background page called VBackground-1.
5.	Add a title by selecting an item from the Borders & Titles gallery. The item appears, but no new page tab is added.
6.	Try to select the border or title shapes. Notice that you can’t do this. Both the background graphics and title have been added to the VBackground-1 page. They show through to Page-1 but can’t be edited from there.
7.	Now go to the new background page by clicking its page tab.
8.	Try to select the border or title shapes. Notice that this time it works.
9.	Add some more shapes to the background page. Drop shapes from stencils or just draw rectangles and ellipses.
10.	Return to the original page by clicking the Page-1 tab. Notice that you can see the shapes that you added to the background page, but you can’t select them from the foreground page.
11.	With Page-1 active, click the Insert Page tab. You should see a new (foreground) page tab named Page-2.
12.	Click Page-2’s tab (if it isn’t already active). Notice that the background graphics show for Page-2 as well. Remember that a background page can be shared by multiple foreground pages, and when you insert a page, the current page’s settings are copied, including background page assignments.

If you look at your page tabs, you can see that your document now has three pages. When you print your document, however, only two pages will come out. The reason is that background pages don’t print as separate pages, but their content prints on foreground pages that reference them.

It is worth noting that background pages can themselves have background pages. A foreground page could have a background page that in turn has another background page and so on. You can create complicated (and confusing) chains and hierarchies of background pages, several layers deep. For certain applications, this capability is quite useful, but you’ll want to guard against complexity that will make maintenance and modification difficult.

Imagine you are designing different web page templates for a website. Every page in the site has the same header and footer, but some page types have different sidebars and navigation menus. In Visio, foreground pages could represent actual web pages in the site. These then reference background pages for their sidebar treatments, and those backgrounds reference the header and footer background. If you needed to change, say, the company logo in the header, you only need to edit the backmost background page, and all of the foreground pages would show that change.

In the previous example, background pages were created for you automatically. To build sophisticated structures like a layered website, you need to know how to create and assign background pages manually.

Adding Background Pages Manually

The process of manually creating background pages is a bit more involved but allows finer control. Be sure to notice the key step of assigning the background page to a foreground page.

Inserting Backgrounds, Titles, and Borders

You’ve seen the Design tab’s Backgrounds group which contains two galleries for quickly adding backgrounds, borders, and titles to your document.

When you pick one of these elements, Visio automatically creates a background page to hold the background graphics, borders, or titles you choose. Backgrounds are easily identified by their obvious names, italic text, and positioning at the end of the page tabs.

Putting titles and other graphics on background pages makes it easier for new foreground pages to share the background graphics. The structure of your Visio document becomes similar to Backgrounds and Background styles in PowerPoint. It also makes it easier to work on foreground pages, as you don’t have to worry about accidentally selecting and moving background shapes.

Backgrounds, titles, and borders that you add from the Ribbon are actual shapes dropped on the background page. You can go to the background page and manually alter them. However, many of them are designed to automatically stretch to the size of the page, or be positioned on one edge, so you might not be able to freely resize or reposition them.

If you pick new border, background or title styles from the Design tab, Visio deletes existing shapes and replaces them with new ones. You don’t have to worry about creating a stack of shapes on the background page, one on top of the other.

Many of the titles have text that indicates the page number. If you look at the page number while a background page is active, you’ll see something like Page 0, which can be disconcerting. Don’t worry, though; the page number is an inserted field that is smart enough to change for each foreground page (go look at the foreground pages and you’ll see reasonable page numbers). 

You also see the word Title in many of the title shapes. This field is not smart in any way, even though it would make sense to link it to the Title field from the document’s properties . At any rate, you have to go to the background page to edit it. Just click on the background page tab, select the title shape, and then type your own title text.