Two new articles and a Tip of the Day fresh out of the factory, see details below:

• Having trouble moving your shapes around in Microsoft Visio?  Check out this article on How to Group Your Visio Shapes on tips for creating easy to move shape modules for your project.
• If you’ve ever received an embarrassing email at work (blind links from friends *shudder*), you should pass this article on What does “Work Safe” mean? to the offending parties.
• Our Tip of the Day category has a new Tip Site suggestion that I’ve found to have a ton of useful information on many different topics.

One of the most frustrating aspects of working with Microsoft Visio is trying to get your shapes in exactly the right places on the page relative to each other.  This can be both a time consuming and stressful process.  However, there is light at the end of the tunnel.  By grouping shapes that share a common function, you can break your project into easier to manage modules instead of a bunch of individual shapes.

This is a pretty easy process (much easier than you are probably thinking).  For starters, find some shapes that you want to group together.  Some examples where this could be useful are:

• A Legend on a map or process flow.
• A block of similar design elements, such as a backend design for an application or the front end modules for the application.
• Any “shape” that is built out of multiple shapes, or really anything that goes beyond the simple shapes you can drag onto your pages.

For example purposes let’s say that we want to group multiple shapes that make up the Legend on our project.  We’ll assume that all of the shapes for the Legend are in place, and it looks exactly how we want it.  However, how do we easily move them all at once without changing the positions of the component shapes? Simple. 

First, select all of the shapes in the Legend; this includes any Text components that you have.  The resulting shapes should look something like this:

Then, right click and select Shape from the resulting menu.  From the Shape menu, select Group.  This is shown below:

Now, your shapes should be grouped and look like this:

There you have it, your Legend module is now complete.  You can move the entire group just like you would a single shape by dragging it around your project.  Also, if you want to modify individual shape position within the group, all you have to do is select that shape and move it.  It really is just that simple.

Lastly, if you want to ungroup your shapes, select the group, right click, and select Shape -> Ungroup.  Now all of the shapes are individual objects again.

This should save you tons of time (it’s been a lifesaver for me many a time), and make your projects easier to update in the future.