Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter
August/September 2005
| Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter August/September 2005 |
The September meeting is on Wednesday, September 21, 2005, from 6:00 pm to 8:30 pm at the Elephant & Castle in San Francisco's financial district. For details about the location and instructions for purchasing tickets, visit www.stc-sf.org/stc-meetings.htm.
Microsoft Visio is likely the simplest software program to use: one simply drags and drops objects onto a page to create a diagram. But it takes more than just dragging and dropping objects onto a page to create effective diagrams.
Beau Cain demonstrates some of Visio's less obvious features while he describes how to convert procedures into diagrams. Along the way, Cain will show how to find and use the many categories of objects that Visio offers, as well as how to perform some unobvious tasks, such as sizing diagrams for inclusion in pages, creating new objects and adding them to stencils, continuing a flowchart or other kind of diagram on more than one page, and adding hyperlinking hotspots in objects.
Beau Cain is a technical communication consultant who troubleshoots
documentation projects. Although not a graphic artist, Cain routinely
creates his own simple diagrams to be included in documents he creates or
troubleshoots, and he fluently uses Visio, Windows Paint, and even the
drawing features in MS Word and PowerPoint to save his clients time and
money.
Cain is currently enjoying his second year of a three-year term as an elected official on the Society's Board of Directors.
Copyright © 2005 by the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter (www.stc-sf.org). This article may be reprinted in another STC publication under the provisions of the chapter's copyright policy.