Tutorial of Visio
A Short Tutorial on Using Visio 2010 for Entity-Relationship Diagrams by Nezar Hussain
Microsoft Visio 2010 is a flexible software tool that allows users to create some diagrams and charts, providing an alternative to using traditional drawing software such as MS Paint. Entity – Relationship diagrams (ERDs) provides a more visual way to represent the design of database tables and the relationships between them. The most popular notation used in textbooks is the Crow’s Foot notation that makes identifying those relationships much easier.
Starting Visio 2010
1. Locate the Visio program in the Start Menu →All Programs → Microsoft Office → Microsoft Visio 2010. As the program opens, a similar window to Figure 1 will appear.
Figure 1
2. Under Template Categories, click on Software and Database. This will take you to the different templates under this category as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2
Now choose the Database Model Diagram, select the desired measurement units from the right hand side and click on Create. You can also choose the Database Model Diagram directly from the Recently Used Templates in Figure 1 if you have chosen this template previously. 3. Once the Drawing window appears we need to setup the program to display Crow’s Foot Notation. Click on the Database tab and choose the Display Options button under the Manage group. The Database Document Options window like in Figure 3a should open up. Now choose the Relationship tab and check the Crow’s feet option as shown in Figure 3b. Click OK to exit this window.
Figure 3a
Figure 3b
4. Before we start to work on drawing our ERD, let’s explore some important parts of Visio here. As we can see in Figure 4, we have Entity Relationship (US Units) under Shapes on the left hand side of the screen. We shouldn’t need shapes from different templates, but if we did we can choose those from the More Shapes button, which will show us a list of all available templates for different diagrams. Once
Microsoft Visio 2010 is a flexible software tool that allows users to create some diagrams and charts, providing an alternative to using traditional drawing software such as MS Paint. Entity – Relationship diagrams (ERDs) provides a more visual way to represent the design of database tables and the relationships between them. The most popular notation used in textbooks is the Crow’s Foot notation that makes identifying those relationships much easier.
Starting Visio 2010
1. Locate the Visio program in the Start Menu →All Programs → Microsoft Office → Microsoft Visio 2010. As the program opens, a similar window to Figure 1 will appear.
Figure 1
2. Under Template Categories, click on Software and Database. This will take you to the different templates under this category as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2
Now choose the Database Model Diagram, select the desired measurement units from the right hand side and click on Create. You can also choose the Database Model Diagram directly from the Recently Used Templates in Figure 1 if you have chosen this template previously. 3. Once the Drawing window appears we need to setup the program to display Crow’s Foot Notation. Click on the Database tab and choose the Display Options button under the Manage group. The Database Document Options window like in Figure 3a should open up. Now choose the Relationship tab and check the Crow’s feet option as shown in Figure 3b. Click OK to exit this window.
Figure 3a
Figure 3b
4. Before we start to work on drawing our ERD, let’s explore some important parts of Visio here. As we can see in Figure 4, we have Entity Relationship (US Units) under Shapes on the left hand side of the screen. We shouldn’t need shapes from different templates, but if we did we can choose those from the More Shapes button, which will show us a list of all available templates for different diagrams. Once