Rotating Visio Shapes to an Arbitrary Degree
Rotating shapes in Microsoft Visio is most conveniently done using the rotation handle (the circle which appears at the top of a shape's boundary when it is selected). We can rotate the shape by hand in increments of five degrees clockwise or counter-clockwise. However, this approach is limiting if we need to rotate a shape in increments smaller than five degrees.
Consider the scenario of a floor plan as pictured below. We need to attach the gray wireless access point shape to the midsection of the angled wall.
The midsection of the wall happens to be angled at 22.5 degrees (the halfway point between 0 and 45 degrees). We cannot rotate our shape to this exact degree by hand.
In order to achieve the necessary granularity, we'll need to specify the degree of rotation manually. To do this, select the shape and open the View menu. From the Task Panes button, select Size & Position.
This opens the Size & Position dialog in the bottom left corner. Here, we can enter the exact degree to which we want to rotate the shape. Prepend a negative sign for counter-clockwise rotations.
After specifying an angle of -22.5 degrees, we can set our access point flush against the wall.
About the Author
Jeremy Stretch is a freelance networking engineer, instructor, and the maintainer of PacketLife.net. He currently lives in Fairfax, Virginia, on the edge of the Washington, DC metro area. Although primarily an R&S guy, he likes to get into everything, and runs a free network training lab out of his basement for fun. You can contact him by email or follow him on Twitter.
Comments
Yep, Gd is right. Also, zooming in help resolution as well...
You're such a visio hustler :P
I'm a fan of these posts though. Anything to make my diagrams look better.
Nice post. I believe GD is right. I keep zooming until I get the right rotation accuracy.
Yeah I suppose I should have thought of that. I came about this solution after googling for the answer. Oh well, hopefully it will help some poor soul who needs to rotate something to 37.29 degrees at some point.
Stretch, I'm the poor soul. I have the classic four switches with the X in between. I was trying to put the subnet text as the same angle as the line in between, and it wasn't working - so I resorted to no angle on the subnet text. But now, I have it rotated to -27.2553 degrees, and it looks great! So, you rock - you're always just a step ahead of me needing an answer. I really appreciate it.
Now, if you could keep the automatic connector from automatically rerouting around text, shapes, etc. when I get it just right but then want to add something else ...
@Brannen: You can prevent a connector from rerouting by modifying its behavior. Select the connector and open the behavior dialog (which is under the developer tab in Visio 2010 for some reason). Under the Connector tab, set Reroute to Never.
I think you might be able to get more rotate granularity by dragging and holding the rotation handle farther away from the shape while rotating?