Smart Drawing Shapes
Here is a detailed introduction of the most commonly used drawing shapes and the guide about how to use them. The simplest way to know what you can do about smart shape is to select it and find out what control buttons are attached.
Major Types of Smart Drawing Shapes
Several types of smart shapes are introduced in this article. Click the corresponding links to learn more about them.
When using these shapes, you don't need to worry about layout or format. They are automatically connected, perfectly aligned and coordinately colored. The last four types of shapes are made up of sub shapes. Clicking the first time on the shape area selects the whole shape. Clicking the second time (time interval is a little bit longer than double click) selects the sub shape right under the cursor. Double clicking a shape activates its text box.
Standard Flowchart Shapes
A set of standard flowchart shapes are offered. These are really intelligent shapes which sometimes know what to do when you are moving them. The Basic and Highlight Flowchart shapes have four triangle arrows on top, bottom, left and right of the shapes. Clicking them adds or connects shapes on the corresponding direction.
When you are dragging a shape from the Symbol panel to the document, this shape is added to another one when the floating button turns red.
Check out an amazing flowchart made with the standard flowchart shapes.
Organizational Chart Shapes
The floating buttons of the highest level organizational chart shapes are located on the bottom.
Other levels of organizational chart shapes have two floating buttons. The left one is for adding colleagues and the bottom one is for adding subordinates. Click one floating button or drag another shape from the symbol panel over it to add one shape each time.
Here are some marvelous org chart templates made with the smart shapes. Download them and make some changes to represent your organization's structure.
Mind Map Shapes
Each mind map shape has one floating button. Each time you click it, you add one sub shape to its shape. But there is another faster way to use mind map shapes.
See how these shapes can help you create fantastic mind maps in the sample mind maps below.
Circular Diagram Shapes
This kind of shapes are mainly formed by sub shapes like circles, arrows, boxes and sectors surrounding a center. They are mainly used to represent cycles. You can also use them to show this case: several elements are all related to a main factor in the center. All of them have floating buttons. Some shapes are designed with two floating buttons. The inner one is for altering the central sub shape. Some of the shapes contain diamond control buttons for more operations. By dragging them, you can change shape size or gap/interval between shapes.
According to different shapes' features, the floating buttons contain different options. You can mainly do the following operations by clicking the floating button:
Lists Shapes
The major features of Lists Shape are similar to Circular Shapes. Its distinctive function is that you can use Set Zoom Size command to make the sub shapes in different sizes - gradually enlarging or gradually shrinking.
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