37 docs tagged with "shapes"

With draw.io, you aren't just limited to flows, org charts, network or UML diagrams. You can use braces, brackets, connectors and partial rectangles to add neat labels to any type of diagram.

Diagrams look neater and are easier to read when the shapes are aligned and evenly spaced. It can be time consuming to line everything up using the grid by hand - there is an easier way. In the Arrange tab of the format panel, the Align and Distribute tools let you align and space multiple shapes quickly and easily.

In any diagram with branches - trees and org charts, Ishikawa diagrams, wiring diagrams, and even some flow charts - you will have multiple overlapping connectors attached to the parent shape. Using a waypoint shape between connectors will prevent manual alignment frustration when you move the parent or child shapes.

When you work with container shapes, dropping a shape over that container inserts that shape into that container. While this is useful for adding steps to a flow chart inside a flow lane (e.g. using the flow layout shape), you may not necessarily want to add the shape for the person responsible into the flow lane container, but instead overlay it.

You can quickly build flow charts, mind maps or tree diagrams using shortcut key combinations.

The automatic layout shapes in the Advanced shape library in draw.io organise your flow charts, tree diagrams, org charts, and mind maps for you as you add and connect more shapes. The automated layout ensures that all shapes in your diagram are spaced evenly, either in a horizontal or vertical format, and will automatically increase or decrease the container shape's size to match the contents.

Bioicons is a collection of free custom shape libraries containing open source icons for life science applications. The website lets you select one or more shape libraries, and open them in the draw.io editor on the web.

While the dream of drawing technical diagrams is to be able to understand them with very little text, labels on shapes and connectors add essential descriptive elements. There are many ways to style text in draw.io - you can even use multiple styles in one label.

Instead of dragging shapes from the shape library in to the drawing canvas, you can quickly add them by simply clicking on the shape. This makes it faster to add a lot of shapes to the canvas at once, and then place, style and connect them later.

You can use custom shape libraries to store and share custom template diagrams, in addition to your favourite shapes, freehand sketches, and custom shapes. As you can also store icons, watermarks, images, parts of a diagram, and entire finished diagrams in custom shape libraries, they are an excellent way of sharing your custom templates with people outside your organisation.

When you slice a 3D shape up and layer it in a diagram, you clearly visualise that a concept or process is broken up into smaller parts. Here's a step-by-step tutorial to create your own infographic using shapes from the basic draw.io shape libraries.

You've long been able to add basic shadows to shapes in draw.io. But now, you can customise shape shadows - set their colour, offset, opacity and blur so your diagram makes the impact you want.

With draw.io, tables aren't limited to holding text data. Because you can drop shapes and images into container table cells and drag connectors between them, you can get creative with diagrams inside tables.

Normally, when you resize a group of shapes, all of the shapes are resized proportionally, and maintain their positions in relation to each other.

Flowcharts are one of the most used types of diagrams in all teams. But some process flows are circular or cyclical rather than a series of steps with a start and end. You can create circular flowcharts in the draw.io editor in a number of ways.

When you draw a freehand shape in draw.io, it is saved as an image with a transparent background on the drawing canvas by default. You can change the freehand-drawn shape's style like you would many other shapes: line colour, fill colour, opacity and more. You can also resize, flip and rotate your freehand drawing.

Quick mockups of the user interfaces are invaluable for software developers and designers both for websites and software or mobile applications. Designers and software engineers can draw it together collaboratively with the mockups shape library in our draw.io apps or our online editor.

Timelines, roadmap and milestone diagrams feature in a range of documentation - project development documents, infographics and presentations being some of the most common. There are many shapes and templates in draw.io and our draw.io branded apps that you can use to quickly draw an attractive diagram that you can embed in your presentation or documentation.

The shape libraries in draw.io provide you with a wide variety of shapes and clipart to use in your diagrams. The Style tab lets you quickly style your shapes, but for finer control and complex shapes, you can modify the shape properties.

You can now edit a shape's connection points visually with the new connection point editor. Drag the connection points around the shape, add new connection points, and delete those you don't need.

If you've worked on a project in a team, you've probably seen a Gantt chart. These diagrams are used in all industries to plan tasks, note dependencies and track progress. You can create Gantt charts easily in draw.io in a number of different ways.

There are so many different notations used for technical diagramming that this is a hard question to answer. draw.io supports all your icon needs - there are shape libraries for a vast range of different technical diagrams, and you can extend the built-in libraries with your own shapes in a custom library if you need to.

In addition to sending shapes to the back or bringing them to the front, you can now step shapes backwards and forwards when the overlap each other.

Shapes are placed on the drawing canvas in draw.io using a default orientation. You can rotate shapes into another position as you need.

The search field in draw.io has been extended. In addition to shape search, you can now open various features from the menu via the search field, generate a smart template, apply styles to text, and more. The omnibox search field can speed up your diagramming workflow.

If you want to delete a shape and all of the connections to and from that shape, you can do that with a keyboard + toolbar shortcut.

You can swap shapes on the drawing canvas in draw.io via the Arrange tab of the format panel, or by dropping a new shape from the shape libraries on top of an existing shape. You can also reverse the arrows on a connector easily via the Arrange tab.

Watermarks are used widely in photography, illustrations and diagrams. You can add a watermark to a draw.io diagram in a number of ways - using a locked shape or image, a locked layer in the foreground or background that contains the watermark, or a watermark on a separate diagram page used as a background image.

Timing diagrams are important for activities that need to be completed within a specific time frame. Such as the ringing of a doorbell after pressing a button, or a ticket gate opening after a ticket has been validated.

Emoji are being used in all communications at all levels of society - a single picture takes up less space and conveys more information than its matching text. You can use the Unicode emoji in shape and connector labels, and in tooltips in your diagrams.

The improved table shapes in draw.io are useful for many different types of diagrams. Now, using the grab handles on the sides of table rows in draw.io, you can select rows more easily, and move a row to a new position in a table, or move it to another table - even if that table is a different size.

There are a large number of keyboard shortcuts that let you create diagrams faster and more easily with draw.io. One of the more common and time-consuming tasks when you create a diagram is styling shapes and connectors.

The list shape in draw.io functions just like a table shape - use keyboard shortcuts, or the table tools in the Arrange tab of the format panel on the right, or the table tool in the toolbar above the drawing canvas to quickly add and delete list entries.

Japanese, Chinese, and Korean texts can be written vertically, and read from right to left. draw.io can now display labels and text shapes vertically without rotating the characters, to be read top down, from the right to the left. Use the Text tab of the format panel to change the Writing Direction.

The shapes, connectors and text elements in your diagram are described in XML - their sizes, locations, groupings, shape styles, z-order on the drawing canvas, and how they are connected to each other. You can attach much more information than this to create richer diagrams and interactivity, including tags, tooltips, links, custom shape properties and more.

When you set a default style for shapes and connectors in draw.io, all subsequent shapes that you add from the shape library will use that default style. This includes shape outline or connector line colour, thickness and style, shape fill colour and effects, opacity and more.

Each shape in a diagram can contain metadata or custom properties - extra information about those shapes.