Changing the Appearance of Selected Entities

The Selected Entity Settings ribbon on the Styling tab allows you to determine the appearance of entities. This gives you further control over your data by allowing you to manually make certain entities stand out by using size, color, border thickness, and so on. For instance, if you are looking at data involving the United States of America, you could use the Selection Tool to identify and select states with population greater than 10,000,000. Then, you could change the entities of those states to be a different shape and color than the entities for states with population less than 10,000,000.

Settings made here will apply only to selected entities, whereas settings made in the Gradient section will apply to all entities.

With one or more entities selected, change any of the following settings.

Entity shape

Allows you to change the shape of selected entities.

Image

Allows you to change the image for the selected entities.

Property

Allows you to change the selected entity's current label to a different property.

Toggle label

Activates and deactivates labels for selected entities.

Fill color

Allows you to change the interior color of the selected entities.

Entity Settings

Access the following settings by clicking the arrow in the bottom-right corner of the Entity Settings area of the ribbon. Allows you to use shape and label settings to alter the appearance of entities.

Shape Settings

  • Shape—Sets the shape of the entities.
  • Image—Allows you to change the image for the selected entities.
  • Width—Sets the width of the entities.
  • Maintain aspect ratio check box—Automatically adjusts the height based on the width, to maintain the aspect ratio of the entities.
  • Height—Sets the height of the entities.
  • Fill color—Sets the interior color of the selected entities.
  • Shadow—Adds the appearance of a shadow behind the selected entities.
  • Border color—Sets the color of the selected entities' borders.
  • Thickness—Sets the width of the selected entities' borders.

Label Settings

  • Show labels—Activates labels on the model.
    Note: Large models will load and change layouts more quickly if labels are turned off for both entities and relationships.
  • Font—Sets the font of the labels.
  • Font size—Sets the font size of the labels.
  • Label location—Sets the location of the entity labels as inside or outside the entities.
  • Label position—Sets the position of the entity labels relative to the entities. The label can appear on any side or corner of the entity.
  • Color drop-down box—Sets the color of the labels.
  • Wrap label—Forces labels exceeding maximum width to break onto multiple lines.
  • Trim label—Trims labels exceeding maximum width.
  • Maximum width—Sets the maximum width allowable for labels.

Click Apply to make shape and label settings changes to your model.