VISIO A First Time Users Guide for Chemical Engineering Students

Visio is a drawing programme used to show detailed design sketches, plant layouts,
mechanical drawings, process flow diagrams (PFDs), and piping and instrumentation
diagrams (P&IDs), as well as the real world things like flowcharts, brainstorming
trees and block diagrams. It is incredibly useful for PED, but moreover, is invaluable
for your design project, which most of you will be completing next semester. It should
be noted that this document does NOT contain instructions for everything you can
possibly do with Visio; rather, it contains some tips that past PED and DP students
have come up with that you may find useful.
Where it is found
Visio is available to students in the computers in the Old Eng Building. 24 hour
access to these labs can be obtained at the student reception in the building. Also, the
Melbourne University Computer Students Association (MUCSA) sells certain
computer software products for engineering students for very low prices. Microsoft
office and Visio can be found here. Check out this website for more information on
location and opening hours.
http://www.mucsa.org/software/
Opening a New Document
Start menu Programs Microsoft office Microsoft Visio 2003
(If it comes up with Preparing to install, click cancel its already on the
computer anyway)
It should open up with a Template screen this will be for the Process Engineering
template, the default opening setting. I recommend always selecting Piping and
Instrumentation Diagrams (Metric) since it comes up with more shape template
choices and, well, were not in America.

NOTE: If you have multiple Visio documents open, Visio will not give you a tab for
each in the toolbar on the bottom of your screen; rather, to switch between windows,
use the Window menu. (This means giving your document an easily comprehensible
name is important!) You can also tile the windows and lay them side by side (very
useful if trying to produce drawings to a certain scale or copy and paste new icons
across)

Resizing the page

Visio will open a new blank document, with a window called Shapes. The first thing
to do is to change the document setup.
File Page setup
Under the Print setup tab, choose your page size and layout (I recommend A3
landscape, since it can be resized more easily as a PDF, while retaining more detail).
Click on the Page size tab and choose Same as printer paper size (this is very
important or confusion can easily arise!). Click OK. Adjust the paper zoom to a
suitable level (80-130%, whatever you find easier).

Shapes
You will notice in the Shapes window on the lefthand side of the screen that there
are multiple tabs. I wont go through what they contain, since its pretty self
explanatory have a play and get comfortable with them. However, there are a couple
of really useful tabs that you should know about.
File Shapes Visio Extras Title blocks (metric)

This template contains 4 and 8 zone borders, which not only make your drawing look
more professional, but it makes referencing easier (eg Valve 202, (see Quadrant 2C,
Fig. 3a)) , and title blocks, which are used in industry (and your DP!) to put the name

of the designer, company, scale, size and page #. Again, this makes your drawing
considerably more professional, and can give you an edge in terms of presentation.
A couple of other useful templates:
Block Diagram Basic Shapes
Map Landmark Shapes (good for plant layouts contains the Scale icon)
Do play around with the shapes menu see what you find works for you!

Positioning Your Shapes

To get a shape from the template, click and drag it to approximately where you want
it on the page.
Right click on the shape, and under View, select Size and Position Window. This
will allow you to position the shape exactly as you want it on the page, as well as to
change the scale, allowing your drawing to be accurate to your chosen scale, and to
align your shapes perfectly. It also allows you to rotate/stretch the shapes in a known,
reproducible manner.

You can, if you want to, join shapes together. There are 2 ways if you drag one
shape on top of the other at the designated connection points (the green
squares/diamonds), a red square will appear this indicates that they will connect.
However, this can be problematic, since they will reshape themselves and not
always in the way that you want them to! As well as dragging pipelines from the
Pipeline template, you can also use the connector tool (the top toolbar on the
immediate right of the cursor icon) to connect two shapes. For pipelines etc, this can
be manageable, but if you are drawing something that doesnt have a specified
template, it can be problematic. Especially if the drawing is something you want to
reproduce (say, a new symbol for a valve), it is better to highlight all the pieces
involved by clicking and dragging a square around them with your mouse on the
empty paper, right click, and under the Shape menu, choose Group. This can then
be copied, pasted, and moved ad nauseum without having to worry about the drawing
mutating or losing pieces.

In order to ensure that the drawing doesnt have any gaps, increase the zoom while
moving the shapes (using either the mouse or the arrow keys). If only small
movements are required, try holding down the shift key while moving the shape with
the arrow keys.
New Shapes/Drawings
For things like mechanical/technical drawings, you will have to draw some new
pieces of equipment. Often, the best starting point is one of the template shapes,
rescaled to your needs. However, you will need to draw your own details by using the
drawing toolbar up the very top of the menu. Drawing the shape in roughly, then
adjusting as needed by using the size and position window is the easiest way to go
about completing this.
Saving your new file
Whatever you do, do NOT save it on the desktop on the computers in the Old Eng
building! The computers often will not register the new file, meaning that next time
you log on, your saved document, on which you have worked so hard, will be gone!
So save it on a thumbdrive and/or email a copy to yourself.
To save the document as a PDF file choose: File Print
Print to the PDF creator and click OK. After selecting a name for your new PDF,
and choosing a location to save it, click Save. This document can then be printed to
a printer with any size of paper as needed. However, dont discard the Visio original
or you will not be able to change as you need to!