Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “LucidChart Layers Tutorial”.
This lucidchart tutorial will show you one way that you can use layers in lucidchart to create kind of an interactive activity, and this is meant really with students in mind, with maybe a k-12 class setting. But these same principles that I’ll be showing these same techniques could be used in the business world in engineering situations or network diagramming kind of settings. So, assuming that you already have a lucidchart account, I’m just gon na jump in I’m gon na create a new chart, and this is gon na, be let’s say in an elementary school class, it’ll be a chart that will help students learn a little bit about the Parts of speech, so I named it, click, OK and then next, maybe I start dragging on these standard text. Shapes drag one on there I’ll call. This noun drag another one on verb, adjective and I’ll stop there. But you get the idea, I’m sure, and I’m going to separate these out a little bit so there’s they’re spread out now. I would love to make it so that when I click on the word noun or anywhere in this square, that some examples of nouns would appear – and these could be text – examples – images whatever and same with verbs and adjectives. I like to click and be able to see those examples pop up on the screen. Well, this is easier to do than you might expect, but there’s a couple of tricks and tips that you’ll need to know.
The first thing to do is right. Click on each shape, one at a time and choose create hotspot, let’s start just with nouns notice that it filled in my shape perfectly with a hot spot. So what that means is that lucidchart will be able to sense whether someone clicks inside this shape on this hot spot. Next, what will happen when they click? I can choose an action by clicking there notice that three of these options are related to layers. I can make it show a layer hide a layer, I’m just gon na go with toggle layers, so switch back and forth between layers, basically make it hidden, make it visible back and forth next up. It gives me the opportunity of creating a new layer.
Now I could do this over here on the right using the dock, if I want to, but I’m just going to go ahead and make it right now I’ll click where it says, create new layer and I’ll type in person place thing: that’s going to be the Name of this layer and then I’ll click, the plus sign, and now I have a new layer while I’m at it. I may as well also make one for verb and one for adjectives, so I’ve just worked ahead of myself a little bit there, but that’s! Okay! Now all I have to do is select the right one for nouns so person place or thing click done. So, let’s review what I’ve done. Basically, I’ve created a hot spot here and, in addition to creating the hot spot, I created three layers that you can see over here on the right tied to this layers button.
Each of these is a blank layer for now, but there’s one corresponding to each shape that I’ve put on the screen and I’ve set it up so that lucidchart will sense. If someone clicks on this hot spot and if someone does it will activate the person place thing layer, the thing is: there’s nothing on that layer. So, let’s put something on there: I’m just going to double click where it says person place thing now, if you single click, it does select it but you’re going to want to double click, because what that does? Is it kind of isolates that layer from all the other layers you can see everything else is grayed out so now I want to add some pictures. Let’S say of examples of person place thing of nouns, so I’m going to go here in the upper left corner where it says search and I can just search for let’s say a person I’ll just pick this gentleman here and drag them onto the screen. So there’s a example of a person. Now all three of these images are on that specific layer.
The person place thing layer they’re not on the regular screen they’re not on these other layers, either. Now, there’s a couple more steps I need to take before my hotspot is ready to work first, I need to tell these items that are on this person place thing layer to be hidden by default, so I’m going to click this little eyeball doesn’t even quite look Like an eyeball, it’s so small, but if you click on that it hides the shapes and the images I’ve just added now, sometimes you’ll notice. This button here will won’t be grayed out it’ll be in black. If that happens, you may need to click this.
What it does is it syncs the published visibility it. Basically, whatever you see here on the screen that will be synced so that when the viewers see or your chart see your page here in this case those icons will be invisible. So just know you may need to click that to make this actually work. Sometimes it’s not enough just to click the eyeball and hide it so to test out what the viewer will see.
All I have to do is click demo. So now, if the viewer comes along and clicks notice that they appear, if the viewer clicks again, it hides them now. This is just a very simple example, but I hope that you’ll take these principles and be able to use them in whatever your purpose is in using lucidchart.
Of course, I could go on and make examples for verbs and adjectives that are clickable, but I think you get the idea now remember. This is just a demo when you’re done with the demo, you can tap escape to get out of it and come back to the chart builder screen and then here like I say I could continue to build this. But let’s pretend like I’m done and I’m ready to publish this so that the students can view it or so the public can view it. Whoever my audience is to do that. I go to share and I click share in the upper right corner and there’s other ways I could do this, but personally I would prefer to either publish it as a web page that could be accessed or to embed it on a web page that I already Have so I want to give you an example of this if I really wanted to put this diagram or chart on a public website, I could do simply these steps click here, where it says, publish link. If I don’t do that, I could still try to embed it, but it wouldn’t be public. It wouldn’t be visible by the public, so I’m going to click, publish, link and then highlight this text. This is the embed code, so I highlight it. I copy it and then I go to whatever I use to build my own website as an example I’ll show this on Weebly calm. This is a website builder, with Weebly here at the left. There’S different things that you can add to the page, and one of the things you can add is an embed code. So I’ll click and drag drop that it says, click to set HTML. I click there.
In the box, I paste in the embed code, click outside the embed code box and it will pull in my lucid chart. Now when I publish my page there’s my lucid chart on the screen and notice that if I click on the word noun, my images appear. So I have created a simple interactive using lucid chart and it’s usable on my own website. Now there are some things I need to figure out like, for example, it tends to zoom in automatically a little bit when I click every once in a while.
So it’ll suddenly zoom in and that bothers me a little bit. I need to figure out why that’s happening, but I hope that I’ve set you on the right path to learning how to use layers to create kind of an interactive situation on your own charts, whether that’s for teaching or whether it’s for maybe you’re, creating a network Diagram and you want to be able to click on something and have a layer appear or disappear. There’S lots of things you can do with layers, so I hope you found this tutorial worthwhile.
If you want to get an overview of all the basics of lucidchart, please check out my other video, my tutorial overview of lucid chart. .