Go With The Flow
At the community college I teach at, before students start programming on a computer they learn programming logic by doing flowcharts. Most do them by hand with a template, but the true geeks-in-training want to find some way to do in on the computer. I've seen everything from a page with carefully spaced printer words and hand-drawn shapes and arrows to the grainy nastiness of a flowchart done in MS Paint. Occassionally someone will plunk down money for a drawing program or even a specialized flowcharting program. That's great... if you need a drawing program for something else. Most of them rarely do a flowchart after they leave college again. And all the time, they had access to a lab with MS Word on it.
Whether you're in class or need some kind of flowchart for programming or your business processes, if you have a copy of MS Word there's no need to spend anything more for flowcharting software. The drawing toolbar has possibilities you haven't yet dreamed of. This tutorial was originally written for users of Word 97, but all successive versions should still have the same abilities, though the arrangement and appearance of items may change slightly)
Sedan is Not an Autoshape
First, make sure the Drawing Toolbar is showing in Word. The drawing button (
) on the standard toolbar must be pressed down. The drawing toolbar usually positions itself along the bottom of the document, but like all Word toolbars it is re-positionable, so it could be anywhere (or even floating.)
We're mostly concerned with the 'Autoshapes' menu and the two tools to the right of it: lines and arrows. Click Autoshapes and you should see a menu put up with Lines, Basic Shapes, Block Arrows, Flowchart, Stars and Banners, and Callouts. If you've never used these before, you can probably learn a lot by pausing this tutorial now and just playing. Experiment. Figure out what a 'callout' is. Find the happy
Okay, Ready? Back to business: You may notice that the menu itself has a shaded bar at the top, as do the submenus. Click Autoshapes, then Flowcharts. Instead of picking a shape, move the mouse over that shaded bar; it should change color. Click and drag that bar away from the menu. This is what is called a pull-off or tear-off menu: the flowchart shapes palette is now a floating window.
Flowcharts (programming ones, anyway) begin and end with a process terminator. On the flowcharts palette, this is the third shape in the leftmost column (you can also hover the mouse over a shape to get it's description.) Click the shape, then draw it on the document by clicking and dragging from the top-left to bottom-right of where you want the shape. If it doesn't turn out perfect, don't worry: you can always resize or reposition it later.
This is the point that stops most people. Some people get this much, then give up. I've seen flowcharts turned in beautifully laid out with autoshapes and lines and
Simply right-click the shape you've drawn. Near the middle of the menu that pops up is Add Text. Click it, and the shape turns into a Word text box but retains it's original shape. Type the word Start. You can center or format your text however you want, the text box is like a mini-document inside your document. Note: No matter what the shape, the text area inside is rectangular. So the diamond shape will not have text that goes into the points. This is one of the minor drawbacks to using Word for flowcharts.
There is a tweak we can make here that will maximize the text we can fit in this box. For near rectangular shapes like the terminator, it won't buy us a lot of space, but for diamonds and such we'll take every extra pixel of space we can get. Right-click the thick shaded border around the shape and select Format Autoshape. On the window that pops up, click the last tab: Text Box. Change all the internal margins settings to 0.
If you want to keep zero internal margins on all your shapes from now on, right-click the shaded border again and click Set Autoshape Defaults. Nothing seems to happen, but new shapes you draw will have zero margins. If you had changed the border color/thickness or fill, that new style would also have become the default. (This change is only for this document, the next time you do a flowchart you'll need to do this again.)
One more tip for the shapes: There's a reason we pulled the flowchart menu off into a floating toolbar. Some shapes we use a lot, such as the rectangle or the diamond. Normally when you click a shape the cursor returns to normal after you draw the shape. But double-click the shape and it remains selected until you single-click it again. You can't do that on the menu, but you can with the floating palette.
Arrows is Arrows...
Whether you complete each step of the flowchart before moving to the next is up to you. Personally, I reccommend laying out the shapes and text first, and then drawing in the lines and arrows after everything fits on the page the way you want it.
The line or arrow tools on the toolbar work pretty much the same as the shapes: select, click & drag. Double-click to draw many lines/arrows without reselecting. And although it's tricky to right-click on that thin little line, you can Format Autoshape on it too, changing the thickness of the line or the size and style of the arrowhead. Set Autoshape Defaults works too.
You may notice that the tip of the line is not always exactly where the mouse crosshair is pointing. The endpoints of the line snap to an invisible 'grid'. The nice thing about this is that the autoshapes snap to the same grid, making it easy to get the arrows to line up with the points & edges of the shapes.
If you need finer control, hold down the Alt key. The grid is ignored and the line goes exactly where you place it. Also try holding down Ctrl: the line is restricted to angles in 15 degree increments. And, if you need a double-headed arrow, there's one on the Autoshape Lines submenu.
Yes, No... Maybe?
You now have the ability to draw flowchart symbols with text and all the arrows and lines to connect them. But what of those decision diamonds, with two or more arrows leading away from them? How do you add the little Y and N indicators to label each path?
The easiest thing is to use a small text box. The text box tool on the toolbar is a white square with the letter A and several lines in it, located to the right of the oval. Select it and draw a small box near the point where the arrow leaves the diamond. Type your Y or N or whatever is appropriate.
But to really look professional we need to get rid of the box around the letter, and make sure the 'white background' doesn't block out other parts of our drawing. Right-click the shaded border around the selected text box and select Format Textbox. This time it's the first tab we're concerned with: Colors and Lines. Under Fill, set Color to No Fill. Under Line, set Color to No Line.
From this point you could Set Autoshape Defaults again so that all your textboxes would have no border/background. Or, since all of these indicators are likely to be the same size (big enough for one letter), I usually simply select the text box (click on thick shaded border) and copy it to the clipboard. Now I can paste as many as I need and reposition them and change the letter as neccessary. One warning: remember that text boxes are like mini-documents, so be sure to deselect each text box (click away from it) before pasting, or the new text box will go inside the other one.
Another tip: If you want to get more text in those decision diamonds, try overlaying the diamond shape with a borderless text box. You'll be responsible for making sure the text is contained in the diamond (easier if you center the text) but you can go all the way to the points if you want to.
Lagniappe*
If you're a student, a word of advice: If you play around long enough with the drawing toolbar and the format autoshape window, you'll eventually discover how to do things like give gradient or photo-textured backgrounds to your shapes. While these will undoubtedly make your flowchart stand out from the stack, no teacher I know would give you higher marks because of it. And if detracts from the readability of the chart, your grade could actually suffer.
For school or business, a flowchart must be readable; art is secondary. Color is nice, as long as it makes sense: having every shape be a different color is both ugly and confusing. Instead, color code to coordinate with the process. For example, cyan-backed terminators and yellow decision blocks, leaving the main process blocks white. Or different colors for differnt sub-processes. Sound boring? A little boring is a good thing here. Or, if you're laying out a business process, color-code by responsibility.
You can still dress it up a little even if all you have is a black and white printer. How about thicker borders on the decision blocks? Bold fonts only for certain processes? Or maybe just add a touch of style by putting the 'title' of your document in an Autoshape 'banner'.
