viziblr

A perquisite of working at Microsoft is serendipitous discovery of tips & tricks for applications one uses everyday.  Today was a discovery about Visio and how to quickly resize pages.

Let me account for my scenario as follows: I often draw large, sprawling diagrams and invariably achieve a state where I simply have more shapes on the screen than can fit conveniently fit on the page. In other words …

HOW I NORMALLY RESIZE THE PAGE

What I used to do was simply resize the page to fit the contents.

The manual way to do this is to go to File > Page Setup

Then clicking on Page Size tab

Then clicking on Size to fit drawing contents

After which, you will see that the preview has changed …

And then click OK

And finally the page has now grown bigger to fit all the shapes

This still leaves me with a couple of problems

• It removes excess space that I *wanted* – you’ll notice that the two upper rectangles are now at the edge of the page
• As a consequence, I has to manually add more space to page using the same dialog
• Also the shapes have been somewhat shifted off the grid  - it’s hard to see this in the image but if you compare to where the shapes where before the page resize you’ll see a slight change

A BETTER, INTERACTIVE WAY

We start with the original drawing

Remember my goals:

• I want to preserve the distance that the two upper rectangles have from the page edges
• I want the bottom rectangle completely on the page
• I want some extra spacing from the bottom rectangle to the page edges
• I don’t want to launch the Page Setup dialog
• I want the shapes to preserve their alignment on the grid

So first move the mouse somewhere you can see it at pay attention to what it looks like

OK, it’s a pointer.

Now Press and Hold Down the CTRL key and …

OK, it’s still a pointer … but now move the mouse to the bottom edge of the page (keep holding CTRL down)

And you’ll see the mouse pointer looks different indicating that you can grab the edge. Keep holding down CTRL and click with the ledft mouse button and then move the mouse down as far as you want.

The dashed indicate the new page size. Now just release the mouse button and the page be set to the new size.

And you can follow the same procedure for the right edge …

And then you’ll have this… a resized page without any excessive trips to the Page Setup dialog.

Wasn’t that nice?