 In this training video we're going to look at the use of the auto connect feature which can be used to produce visual diagrams in an automatic way. Now it's really useful for some diagrams, not all diagrams, but there's a lot of diagrams with this feature that can be very very useful and one of them is a flow chart. So I want to start off a basic flow chart, I've got basic shapes open here as a stencil and it's the basic shapes diagram template that I'm using. If I wanted to create a flow chart I could do a, use a rectangle, drag it onto the page, I could then go to arrow shapes and I could draw an arrow, but this is very manual and then I could extend the arrow and I could then bring another rectangle on or copy it using CTRL D so I could duplicate, make sure they join together and this kind of idea. So this, this is how flow charts are often created using a manual process, using basic shapes or other stencils in Visio and then joining arrows together with the base, with the different shapes. So this wouldn't take too long, but there's a more effective way than creating a flow chart than this in Visio and that can be done using the auto connect shape, so feature. So I'm going to delete these shapes and I'm going to make basic shapes, the active stencil by clicking on it first bowl on the view tab, I can turn on a feature called auto connect. So this is how you can auto connect shapes and it'll actually produce its own arrow. So I'm going to auto connect, now I'm going to pull a rectangle on the page in this example. Now the beauty of having an auto connect though, I'm going to hover over it, it's a little arrow is going around it, one, two, three, four and these arrows have shapes which can be used and this example is the first four shapes, the square, the rectangle, the ellipse and the circle. So there they are, so I'm going to do a rectangle to rectangle, there's the arrow that joins them and I can quickly now go on and then do another one, so I can quickly produce a flow chart using this kind of method. I can then come down, use the shape again, I'm going to go across a bit, go across a little bit, come down, something like this. So I'm just following a diagram that I've already got on it just to produce this kind of idea. So you can see how quickly you can get some kind of flow chart, I might want a diamond, I can pull that onto the page. Then I can use the arrows to just drag from one arrow to the shape to perform an arrow between them and the arrow pointer I can drag to the top to connect and then I can have another rectangle coming off of it, so something like this and we can see how quickly this has been created, it's just a map of a couple of clicks. If I didn't like the arrows I can then modify them, so when I finish the diagram I tend to turn off the auto-connect when I want to format it, so I'm going to turn off the auto-connect here, do a little bit of formatting, so I wanted the lines to be much thicker, I can go to the home tab, line, weight, make it thicker, I might want to change the colour and I can always use format painter to copy this to the rest of the arrows, so format painter double left click and I can just click away now between all the different arrows, I can see how quickly a flowchart diagram can be created using Vizio, I can change colours quite quickly, so if I wanted the diamond I can just go to a different colour and there's something like a basic flowchart setup, I hasn't had any text typed in but that didn't take very long and that was just using the auto-connect feature, so the auto-connect is very very powerful, it's a great great feature for creating automatic diagrams and using select, using shapes from the auto-connect feature which gives us four shapes and it tends to give you the first four shapes, so I click on one rectangle, turn on the auto-connect as you can see the first four are the rectangle, square, ellipse and the circle and they come in from the top four here, that's where they come in from, but this is how useful this feature can be, it's not always used within diagrams but some diagrams like the flowchart this is very very powerful and very very quick, there are other diagrams where this is very very useful but what you do you find out the diagrams this is useful for as you start producing the diagrams but for any kind of flowchart diagram this is an extremely effective way of creating the diagram and that's using the auto-connect feature and you can turn it on and off, I'm going to turn it off to complete the example but this now completes a demonstration on the auto-connect feature and the ability to create automatic diagrams like the example I produced which is a flowchart diagram, if you enjoyed this video make sure you like and subscribe to our channel, hope to see you for the next tutorial and thanks for watching