OmniGraffle – Inspector Setup and Tips

This is a set of tips that show how I work with OmniGraffle and get the layout of the Inspector to be the way that I want it. You should note that I’m not a big fan of floating inspector windows (or frames or whatever Apple calls them ), I like my menus and status windows to be in a specific place so I can scan with eyes in the place that I’m expecting them to be.

When you startup with OmniGraffle the Inspector window look something like this:

This isn’t very useful. So hit the ‘twisty’ to expand the drop down and you will see something like this:

As you can see we are looking the at the text menu because tray background is “highlighted”. This is OK, but we really need more of the menus to be visible. Having just one of menus available is not really enough.

It’s not very convenient to keep switching from the tab to other all the time. But I just found this feature in OmniGraffle. If you double click the icon when it is unselected then the green padlock icon will appear (if it is selected the double click doesn’t work, don’t worry just keep clicking)

Now, lets repeat the same thing for some of the other menus. Click on the Title Bar of the Properties, Connections as shown, drag it up

Lock some of the menus (according to your liking) – my layout looks something like this:

We want to save this layout so that it comes back – fortunately OmniGraffle has a feature for this to save our layouts. Select Windows, Workspaces, Edit Workspaces like this:

Then click on the little camera to save the current layout of OmniGraffle (and OmniGraffle only). Anytime you want to return to the layout just press F2 and the OmniGraffle will return the remembered layout anytime in the future.