Starting Your Work in ConceptDraw

ConceptDraw is a multi-window environment, that allows you to work with several documents at a time. It has a large number of toolbars and floating dialogs which make creating vector drawings, schemes and diagrams convenient and fast.

The built-in scripting language (ConceptDraw Basic) lets you automate working with documents, making it possible to create "smart" shapes or use external data sources for generating a document - such as databases or spreadsheets.

When you launch ConceptDraw for the first time, the Template Gallery dialog comes up. This dialog lets you choose a template, to base your document on. If you don't want to see this dialog at start-up, remove the Show Template Gallery at Startup check in the ConceptDraw\Preferences... dialog on tab Document.

For this Quick Start guide we won't need templates. Click on the Blank document button in the Template Gallery dialog to create a blank document.

The document window will come up, with the main menus, several toolbars and a blank document.

The Tool Palette toolbar is located in the upper part of the document window under the main toolbar and contains the main tools for drawing and editing shapes and their text.

At the top of the document window you can see the Main toolbar with the default buttons. The user can re-arrange and customize the Main toolbar.

In the left part of the software window locates the Pages\Library window. To open\close this window press the Libraries button on the toolbar.

You can quickly navigate through the pages in your document using the Pages window. To move to a page just click on its picture in the window. To rearrange the pages in your document just drag and drop them in the window.

To rename a page make a double-click on its name.

You can make a page a background one. Make a right mouse click on the page icon in the Pages window and mark the Is Background Page option. The background page will be highlighted blue in the Pages window.

To use a background page make a right mouse click on the page icon in the Pages window and select a page from the Use Background list.

The Libraries window contains the list of the libraries and library objects.

To open a library press the button and select Open... The Open dialog will come up and show the folder containing the libraries.

To add a library object to the document just drag it from the library window to the document or double-click it.

By default, the grid is displayed for more convenient and precise drawing. It can be disabled from the View / Grid menu.

By choosing the Rectangle tool you can draw a rectangle in the document, using the mouse. Press and hold down the mouse button, and drag the mouse across the page to draw a rectangle of the desired size and form. On releasing the mouse button, the rectangle will appear. To select the rectangle, switch to the Select tool and click somewhere on the rectangle. To deselect it, click away from the rectangle. To move the rectangle to some other place, click and hold the mouse button on it, drag it to the needed location and then release the mouse button.

When you are in the select mode, you can resize the rectangle by dragging the corresponding resize handle.

To remove the selected shape, press the Delete key.

If you double-click the rectangle, or press F2 when the rectangle is selected, the text editing mode will turn on. Each shape can have text. The text editing mode will also turn on automatically if you start typing when the shape is selected.

If you press and hold the Option key when dragging a shape, you will drag a copy of the shape instead of the original shape. You can carry the copy to the needed location and release the mouse button to drop it there.

Besides, the selected shape can be moved with the keyboard (the arrow keys).

If you click on a resize handle of a selected shape, the resize handle will get selected and you can use the arrow keys to move the resize handle and reshape the shape by doing so.

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