Help with drawing or layers

[DWR]

I have a neighborhood map that was created in Visio by someone else. It
really looks great, but its hard to work with because it is still all made
up from seperate lines and sections as he drew it.

For instance I can't "fill color" in certain blocks because they are not
blocks but seperate lines. Or trying to fill in one block fills in a whole
section because of the order in which he drew things.

Also, all the name lables are on the same "layer" or "level" as the lines,
so I keep accidently moving the lines when I'm trying to move names and
numbers around.

What I would like to do is "Merge" or "Flatten" the whole thing so that its
all one big line drawing on a base layer. Then I can create other layers
for my names and numbers or fill in squares on the base layer with colors.

I'm thinking of something like "Flatten Layers" in Photoshop.

So, how do I do this?

Or is there a way I could scan in the blank map and convert it lines and
sections in Visio?

Thanks for the help

 

[Mark Nelson [MS]]

You might try using a Background Page to accomplish what you are describing
for "flatten layers". Just insert a new page into your drawing and specify
the existing page to be the background. Now you can draw on top of the old
shapes without accidentally modifying them. You can even snap to the
underlying shapes.

You might also look at the Join command. Select a bunch of line segments
that are supposed to define a filled region. Then choose Shape > Operations

Join. Visio will replace those line shapes with a 2-D shape. If the

segments defined a closed region, the region should now be fillable.

One final thought. Visio is different from some other tools in that it
allows shapes to exist on multiple layers. I don't know if that is
something you can also take advantage of.