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Overview
RFFlow is everything you need to start communicating your ideas with professional-quality charts and diagrams. For presentations, printed documents, your Intranet, or the Web, great looking diagrams have never been so easy to accomplish.
Move Your Chart into Other Applications RFFlow works well with Microsoft Office and Corel WordPerfect Office. After drawing your chart, you can copy and paste it into Microsoft Word , Microsoft PowerPoint , Corel WordPerfect , or any other Windows Application. RFFlow supports Object Linking and Embedding in Windows as an OLE Server. This makes it very easy to use RFFlow diagrams in other Windows programs. You simply copy the chart to the Clipboard and paste it into the destination Windows application. You can embed or link your chart. In both cases, you can edit the chart by double-clicking on it in the destination application.

RFFlow Chart Pasted into Microsoft Word
Charts and Diagrams RFFlow can produce a wide variety of flowcharts, organization charts, and diagrams. We have listed many of them below. To see actual charts, check out the Samples page.
RFFlow Screen Shot
  • Audit Charts
  • Block Diagrams
  • Cause-Effect (Fishbone) Diagrams
  • Computer/Network Design
  • Criminal Investigation Diagrams:
  • Activity Flowcharts
  • Commodity Flowcharts
  • Event Flow and Timelines
  • Link Analysis
  • Telephone Analysis
  • Database Definitions
  • DIN66001 Flowcharting
  • Electrical/Electronic Schematics
  • Entity Relationship Diagrams
  • Floor Plans:
  • Home Layout
  • Office Layout
  • Flowcharts
  • Fluid Power Design
  • Gantt Charts
  • Genetic Pedigree Charts
  • Graham Process Flow
  • Greek Alphabet
  • IDEF0, IDEF1X
  • Industrial Diagrams
  • Organization Charts
  • PERT, CPM, CPA Charts
  • Physical Flowcharting
  • Quality System/ISO 9000 Charts
  • SDL Charts
  • Software Design, including:
  • UML
  • Booch OOD
  • Express G
  • Gane/Sarson
  • Data Flow
  • Martin ERD
  • Rumbaugh OMT
  • Shlaer-Mellor OOA
  • Structure Charts
  • Yourdan Data Flow
  • Timelines
  • Transportation Objects
  • Work Breakdown Structures
  • Web Pages ... and more!
It's Easy to Draw and Edit Charts with RFFlow Even if you've never used a drawing tool before, it's very easy to create flowcharts and diagrams with RFFlow. To add a shape to your chart, click on the shape in a stencil, type in the text, and click the OK button. Then drag the shape to position it. Or, simply drag a shape from a stencil to your chart. Shapes in RFFlow will automatically size around your text. 

All of the most frequently used commands in RFFlow are at easy reach on a large toolbar. You can quickly move, duplicate, delete, and edit the shapes and lines in your chart. A prompt line provides assistance. RFFlow has a multilevel undo capability.

RFFlow Toolbar and Prompt Line

To move around in your chart, use the standard scrollbars in the window, use the arrow keys, or drag the chart with the right mouse button. If your mouse has a wheel, it will work too. You can zoom in to see the details of your chart, or zoom out to see the complete chart. 

Right-click on a shape or line and choose Properties. You can change the color, width, and style of a shape's lines and change the color and style of the interior fill. You can select gradient fills and hatched patterns for shapes. With each color you can select an alpha transparency that allows the background to show through a shape. Line and curves drawn in RFFlow are antialised giving them a smooth appearance. You can also size or rotate a shape, add a shadow to a shape, add a shape number, make a shape a header or footer, link a shape to a file, assign a shape to a layer, set a stacking order, or change a shape to another shape. These operations can also be performed on a group of selected shapes.

Shape Properties Dialog Box
Shapes, Lines, and Text RFFlow includes over 1600 shapes that are carefully organized into stencils designed for specific tasks. The stencils are arranged in an expandable list that allows you to quickly find the stencil or shape you want. Each shape has a ToolTip displaying its name or description. When you purchase an RFFlow License, you get all the shapes.

Stencils and Shapes Dialog Box

You can use the RFFlow stencils or create your own custom stencils with just the shapes and lines you need. You can import bitmaps and clip art pictures from files or from the Clipboard and add them to a custom stencil. You can also draw your own custom shapes in RFFlow and add them to a stencil. 

Lines in RFFlow can be horizontal, vertical, diagonal, or curved. They can be solid, dotted, or dashed and can be any color. You can choose from a large selection of arrowheads of different sizes, shapes, and styles. 

Text is entered and formatted just like it is in your word processor. RFFlow allows you to use multiple fonts and font sizes. The text editor includes bold, italic, underline, color, tabs, subscripts, superscripts, spelling, left, center, and right alignment, special characters, undo, redo, copy, cut, and paste. Each shape can hold up to 5000 characters.

Edit Text Dialog Box
Save Charts to Picture Files RFFlow charts can be saved to disk in the following formats: BMP, EMF, EPS, GIF, HTML, JPEG, PLT, PNG, TIFF, and WMF. This makes it easy to share your charts with others. Simply save your chart as a PNG and attach the chart to your e-mail. If you own Adobe Acrobat, you can save charts in PDF format. You can create Web pages by saving as an HTML file and shapes within the chart can have hyperlinks to other Web pages.
Insert Pictures into Your Charts The Insert menu item in RFFlow allows you to easily insert pictures into your chart. You can insert pictures in the following formats: BMP, EMF, GIF, ICON, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and WMF. You can also copy and paste pictures from the World Wide Web or other sources into RFFlow.
Intuitive Features RFFlow has intelligent features that make common tasks easy and automatic and give you the flexibility you need for your work. With Auto Connect, you simply click on two objects and RFFlow will draw the line to connect them. The Keep Connected button allows you to keep shapes connected as you move them, with the lines stretching or shrinking like rubber bands. All objects automatically snap to grid points, making lining up shapes a very simple task. An automatic alignment feature positions new objects with respect to those already drawn. RFFlow can automatically number the shapes in a chart as you draw them. All the lines in a chart can be edited to mark intersections with crossovers and to round sharp corners. When moving shapes near the edge of the RFFlow window, the chart will automatically scroll. Your completed chart can be automatically sized to fit on a page. 

You can draw enormous charts in a 10-foot by 10-foot drawing area that include up to 65,000 objects and can span up to 64 pages. RFFlow includes a full-function spelling checker and Find and Replace. You can make headers and footers that include page numbers, the filename, the date, and time. Headers can be composed of any number of shapes, lines, or curves. 

With RFFlow, you can link shapes in your chart to other RFFlow charts, files on your computer, or locations on the Internet. These linked shapes then run other programs or open files when clicked. Click on a shape and you open a chart. This lets you make a hierarchy of charts, each showing more of the details. These hyperlinks are preserved if you save the file as an HTML page. This allows you to have a chart on your Web site which jumps to other Web pages when you click on shapes.
E-mailing Your Charts to Others You can easily attach RFFlow charts to outgoing e-mail messages. The recipients simply double-click the attached flowcharts to open the files if they have RFFlow. If the recipients are not RFFlow users, they can download the free viewer version of RFFlow. It allows one to view and print any RFFlow chart. Another way to e-mail your RFFlow charts is to save your charts as a GIF, PNG, or JPEG and attach them to the e-mail. All computers can open GIFs, PNGs, and JPEGs. PNG is usually the best for flowcharts. If you have Adobe Acrobat, you can print your RFFlow chart to a PDF file.
Comprehensive Help, Documentation, and Support RFFlow has an in-program help system that includes the same information as the printed user's guide. Click on Help in the main menu of RFFlow. RFFlow Help includes tutorials on drawing a flowchart and an organization chart. Each dialog box in RFFlow has a Help button that leads you to assistance specific to your current task.

RFFlow Help Topic

Inside each RFFlow Packet is the RFFlow CD, a Quick Reference card, and an 80-page RFFlow User's Guide.  The Quick Reference card contains all the information you need to draw, edit, and print your first chart or diagram in minutes. The RFFlow User's Guide has complete documentation on all of the functionality within the program.

The Quick Reference card and RFFlow User's Guide can also be downloaded for viewing and printing from www.rff.com/documentation. You can also view and print all the shapes included with RFFlow. The index to the RFFlow Shapes page provides an easy way to find out in which stencil a shape is located.

RFF Electronics provides free and unlimited technical support for RFFlow. Simply call 970-663-5767, send a fax to 970-669-4889, or e-mail us at help@rff.com, and we'll be happy to assist you.
System Requirements and Installation RFFlow Version 5 requires Microsoft ® Windows 98, Me, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, or Vista. If you are running any of these operating systems and have a Windows-compatible mouse or pointing device, your system has already met all the requirements necessary to run RFFlow. RFFlow will not run on a Mac unless you have an emulator for Microsoft Windows or can boot your Mac into Microsoft Windows.

RFFlow Setup makes it easy to install the program on a personal computer. RFFlow is shipped on one CD-ROM. You can also download the program to get started immediately. A full installation of RFFlow requires less than 10 megabytes of hard disk space. RFFlow has complete printer and plotter support; if a printer or plotter is installed in Windows, it will work with RFFlow.
Download the Free Trial Version To use RFFlow yourself, we encourage you to download the free trial version.
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