Meanwhile, they’re not taking up precious screen real estate, unless you want them to.Ī “metrics” inspector lets you manually input the horizontal and vertical dimensions you want shapes to have. Only these stay out of the way until you need them. Think of these properties buttons as functioning something like the nested properties palettes in the typical Adobe application.
#How to use lucidchart diagrams windows#
This is ideal for keeping your most commonly-used properties windows close at hand, especially on a larger screen. When you click upon them, dialog boxes appear, which can be dragged around the workspace and docked at different locations. They control things like page settings, shape options, text formatting and task history. Novice users can use the basic settings that the horizontal toolbar provides, while intermediate and advanced users will love the level of control these inspectors provide. But once I viewed the LucidChart tutorials, the thinking behind this arrangement became quite clear: These are inspector panels that give you access to a deeper level of customization of your diagram and its elements. How is this different than the properties toolbar? At first, I wasn’t sure. On the right side of the workspace is a smaller, vertical toolbar with nine icons. This level of control makes it easy to customize LucidChart around the kinds of diagrams you most frequently create.Īcross the top of the workspace, a narrow horizontal toolbar lets you adjust properties for shapes and text – some of the most common tasks you’ll perform within LucidChart.
Like the shape palettes, the app lets you decide which image collections you want to display. The image selector lets you create folders to group your images into collections, and also lets you search the LucidChart library, IconFinder and Google Images for even more images to use in your diagrams. In addition, you can import Visio stencil files into LucidChart shape libraries – very cool!īelow the shape palettes is also a button where you can upload and create collections of external images you want to use within LucidChart. LucidChart also provides a complete collection of shapes for web developers to use in creating website UI (user interface) mockups. Clicking on a button at the bottom of this pane displays a dialog box where you can use checkboxes to customize which of the shape collections you want to display – everything from standard flow chart and data flow shapes and mind maps to UML, Venn, AWS architecture and entity relationship collections. To the left of the workspace are shape palettes, where you can select from an impressive variety of diagram shapes. When you first open LucidChart, the user interface is just a little bit daunting. But I promise it will be worth your while! I apologize in advance for the length of this review – there’s a lot to cover. In this review, we’ll take a look at what’s notable about LucidChart for business applications. More than once, while I was working with it, I found myself smiling and saying, “Wow – that’s cool!” But LucidChart has succeeded in doing so, with its emphasis on helping users to produce professional-looking diagrams quickly and easily, with intuitive functionality that lets users get common tasks done with a minimum number of clicks.
#How to use lucidchart diagrams software#
I review a lot of software and apps that means it’s hard to impress me.
Yet it’s intelligently designed so it won’t overwhelm first-time users.
LucidChart, a new web-based diagramming and visual thinking application, has raised the bar for this genre of software with superlative usability and a wealth of advanced features that will delight power users.
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