Microsoft Visio 2010 : Containers and Lists (part 2) - Lists

Lists

Lists are special container shapes that keep members stacked together in a single column or row. What’s great about lists is that you can drag member shapes up or down in the order, and the other shapes automatically rearrange themselves in the list.

Lists don’t have their own gallery, like containers, and there aren’t a lot of list shapes that come with Visio. However, if you create cross-functional flowcharts, or swimlanes, you will run into lists.

Lists in Cross-Functional Flowcharts

Figures 3, 4, 5, and 6 illustrate how lists are used to manage the swimlanes in a cross-functional flowchart.

Figure 3. Inserting a new swimlane into a cross-functional flowchart. When the mouse is between list items, a blue arrow and orange highlight show where a new list item can be inserted.

Figure 4. After the insert arrow is clicked, a new lane is added to the process. The text for the lane can be immediately edited.

Figure 5. Dragging a lane up to a higher position. Highlighting shows where the lane will be inserted.

Figure 6. The EEE lane is inserted above the White Blue Group lane. Notice that the shapes moved with their respective lanes, and the connector remained intact.

In Figure 3, a new swimlane needs to be added to hold steps that apply to TCR Inc. The figure shows how lists have a nifty “insert” feature. For vertical lists, a horizontal blue arrow and an orange line appear where a new item will be inserted.

Clicking the blue arrow adds the new lane, which appears in Figure 4.

Because Emerald Ecological Enterprises is the main contractor, its swimlane needs to be moved to the top of the process. You can simply grab the lane header and drag it to the top. Figure 5 shows a similar blue arrow and orange line showing where the shape will be inserted when you release the mouse button.

Figure 6 shows the final, rearranged swimlane. The items in the swimlane list are rearranged, and kept tightly together. You don’t need to fiddle around with moving shapes apart, then pushing them back together.

Lists in Wireframe Diagrams

If you have Visio Pro or Premium, you have the Wireframe Diagram template, located in the Software and Database template group. This template enables you to create user-interface mockups.

The stencils that open with this template contain a few list shapes that you might want to experiment with. These lists are designed to contain only certain list members. If you drag shapes from the stencil to a list, only certain list item shapes can be added to the list container shapes. Table 1 shows the pairings.

But lists have the insert arrow feature, so you don’t have to drag and drop in the first place. Just move your mouse until you see an insertion highlight. Figure 7 shows the Menu bar shape, with several menu bar items. You can see that the menu bar is a horizontal list, and that the insert highlighting is rotated at 90 degrees to what you saw earlier in the vertical swimlane list.

Figure 7. Inserting items in a horizontal list.

Wireframe shapes are intended for window, form, and web page design and are meant to be combined with other UI elements to build up a design. Hence, the wireframe list shapes don’t have headers like containers do, because the headers would muddy the design. Without headers, though, it can be hard to find the list containers when you’re working on a diagram. Figure 8 shows two Tree control lists full of Tree control items. You can see that when a list item is selected (in the right half of the figure) the list container is also highlighted with a thin, orange line. Click on the orange line to select the actual list shape.

You also see the familiar Container Tools contextual tab when you select a list or a list item shape. See how the Container Styles choices are slightly different for Tree control shapes? The two trees in Figure 8 show the different bullet styles shown in the Container Styles gallery.

Figure 8. The list container is hard to see until a member is selected. Note the Container Tools contextual tab also shows up for lists.