Obsessed with comics? Me, too. My obsession, however, is creeping into my work. I’m finding more and more references to the genre in my documentation. For example, I have been using thought balloons to represent user needs:

Here’s a quick and easy way to make them.

Find the “2-D Word Balloon” shape

This shape is in File –> Shapes –> Visio Extras –> Callouts

Once the stencil opens, scroll down until you see the 2-D Word Balloon shape. Drag it do your drawing. This shape will serve as the basis for the thought balloon. We’ll change it by creating a bubbly line pattern. A line pattern is the format for the line: dotted, dashed, double, etc. Visio allows you to create custom line patterns.

Before creating the pattern, however, you should change the corner rounding option for the shape. The corner rounding tool may be in your tool bar. It looks like this:

Select any one of the options. You can play with this later to get the look you want.

Create a bubbly line pattern

If it’s not already showing, display the Drawing Explorer palette. You can do this from the View menu.

The Drawing Explorer contains a list of folders. Right-click on the Line Patterns folder and choose “New Pattern…” In the New Pattern dialog enter the name for the pattern (eg: “thought bubble”) and click OK. The default settings are what we want.

The new pattern now appears in the Line Patterns folder. Right-click the pattern name and choose “Edit Pattern Shape”. This will bring up a new window. It may be a little confusing because it looks like visio has opened a new drawing, but it hasn’t.

Now comes the tricky part. Drawing with the grid turned on may help. Draw four straight lines: one a quarter of an inch, one half an inch, one three quarters of an inch, and one a full inch long. Using the pencil tool, drag the curve control of each line up to form a semi-circle:

Once you have these, assemble them in some random order. Be sure to keep the baseline the same:

Now, select all the semi-circles and join them together. The join command is in Shapes –> Operations. Be sure to choose “Join” and not any of the other commands.

Once you’ve joined the semi-circles together, close this window. Visio will want to know if it should update the pattern and all shapes using the pattern. Click “Yes”.

Apply the line pattern to the word balloon

Select the word balloon shape and choose “Line” from the “Format” menu. In the Format Line dialog box, open the pattern drop-down menu. Scroll to the bottom to find the “thought balloon” pattern and select it. You should also change the line weight to the thickest setting (more on this below).

When you click OK, your shape will have the bubbly line pattern, looking like a thought balloon from a comic book:

The balloon will behave just like the original shape from the stencil, so you can move the “tail” piece around to point in just about any direction.

Details about line patterns

The thickness of a line using a custom pattern is determined by the setting of the “Scaled” checkbox in the pattern dialog:

If this box is checked, the line pattern will be rendered exactly as drawn. This means that the actual size of the line pattern will be preserved. This can lead to some unexpected results:

On the other hand, this approach is useful if you want precise control over the line pattern. If so, you’ll probably need to draw them small.

If Scaled is NOT checked, then the size of the line is determined by the Line Weight property, per usual. Keep in mind that this controls the overall thickness of the line pattern, not the thickness of the lines IN the pattern. This illustration shows how different line weight settings affect the shape using the same line pattern: