Editing and Formatting Text
After a hard day of moving text blocks around, you might eventually want to type in some actual characters and format them.
Editing and formatting text in Visio isn’t much
different than in any other Microsoft Office application. You can see
that a good deal of the Home tab is dedicated to text-formatting
controls, and there are plenty of options in the right-click
mini-toolbar as well.
What’s more interesting are the Visio-specific quirks involved with text editing, which you investigate next.
Getting Into Text Edit Mode
The trick with shape text is getting into “text edit
mode” so that you can get your mouse on individual words and
characters. When you first add text to a shape, you simply select the
shape and start typing. This naturally puts you in text edit mode until
you deselect the shape. But how do you edit text that is already there?
There are several ways to get into text edit mode to edit preexisting
text:
- Select a shape using the Text tool.
- Select a shape with any tool; then press F2.
- Double-click
a shape. Text editing is Visio’s default behavior, but shape developers
can override it, so not every shape will enter text edit mode via
double-click.
Once in text edit mode, you can select runs of
characters and format them, edit them, or delete them. Once finished,
exit text edit mode by clicking a blank area on the page. If you want
to keep the shape you are working on selected, press Esc instead.
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The easiest way to get into text edit mode for
subshapes in a group is to subselect them with the Pointer tool and
then press F2.
Although using the Text tool is the official way to
edit text in Visio, it can be cumbersome when working with subshapes.
First, you click on the group, which opens the text edit window for the
group. If the text block obscures the subshapes (which it often does),
it is impossible to get at the subshapes. You can then press Esc to
reveal the subshapes, and finally click on one of them to open its text
edit window. Like I said, cumbersome!
I personally almost never use the Text tool. I just
double-click shapes or select and press F2. It’s much quicker and
easier, once you’re used to it.
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Formatting Text
When you’re in text edit mode, you can type, copy,
paste, delete, and format ranges of characters as you would in any word
processor.
Inside a shape’s text edit window, the world looks a bit different, as Figure 4 illustrates.
In Figure 4, notice the following:
- There is a
standard text ruler control. It lets you specify left, right, first,
and hanging indents as well as tab stops. If you don’t see the ruler,
right-click while editing text and check Text Ruler in the menu.
- Text
is edited right-side up, even though the text block is rotated on the
shape. Although this causes some weird flashing, it’s easier than
twisting your head to read the text.
- Selected ranges of text can be formatted by right-clicking or by using the controls in the Ribbon.
- The
selection handles for the shape are not visible. Only the thin, blue
dashed outline of the shape’s alignment box is visible, along with a
second dashed outline around the text block.
Tabs and Alignment
The text ruler allows you to specify tab stops for
neatly formatting columns of information. Just click anywhere on the
ruler to insert a new tab. Existing tabs can be dragged to new
positions. To delete a tab, drag the marker off the ruler and release
the mouse button.
At first, you might conclude that tabs don’t work
properly in Visio, The problem is that most Visio shapes have
center-aligned text, and center-aligned text doesn’t work well (or make
much sense) with tab stops!
If you need tabs for your shape text, right-align or
justify-align the whole paragraph. Your tabs should look just fine once
you’ve fixed the paragraph alignment.
Text Block Backgrounds
Sometimes
your shape text is on top of geometry or other details that make the
text hard to read. For that reason, a text block can have its own
background color that obscures objects behind it and makes text easier
to read.
In Figure 5,
you see that the text for both the line and connector has an opaque
white background. For lines and connectors, this is the default, since
the text is very likely to be on top of the line.
For rectangles, text doesn’t have a background color by default, since the text is usually in the middle of the shape. In Figure 5,
I’ve moved and rotated the text to the left side of the rectangle to
create a low-budget container. On the top rectangle, you see how hard
it is to read the text. The bottom rectangle is easier to read because
an opaque, white background was added to the text.
To add background fills to text blocks,
click the dialog box launcher for the Font or Paragraph group. In the
dialog, select the Text Block tab. In the Text Background area, select
a color from the drop-down control that matches the background of your
drawing, and then click OK. Your text will be easier to read.
