When we came to Austin for the first stop in our Lucidchart Connect tour, we already knew that people use Lucidchart in a million ways, from creating mind maps during a brainstorming session to building out network architecture in order to demonstrate compliance.

But we didn’t expect that someone would want to use Lucidchart to rickroll his colleagues.

As product pro Taylor Dolbin showed the audience how to use layers and hotspots to make diagrams interactive, one user wanted to know if he could send his colleagues to the video for Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” when they made a bad decision in a decision tree.

Taylor did him one better—with the video shape library in Lucidchart, this user could embed the YouTube video directly into the Lucidchart diagram as its own layer.

The user claimed, “This was worth the price of admission.”

I noticed that Lucidchart Connect is full of these moments—users understanding just how much they can accomplish in Lucidchart. There was an audible “Oh wow” as Taylor showed users how to publish their documents. After the session, I overheard an attendee say, “That is going to save me so much time.” Someone even came up to Taylor to thank him and said he’d already texted his manager to say how much he learned.

Check out our overview of Lucidchart Connect Austin and see how much you’ll learn when you meet the Lucidchart team on tour.

The vision of Lucidchart

Nathan Rawlins, CMO at Lucidchart, kicked off the event by explaining the two main goals of Lucidchart Connect:

1. To show users how they can make the most out of Lucidchart and where we are going as a company
2. To connect with our users to see how they use Lucidchart and what they want to see in the product moving forward

Lucidchart has over 11 million users, and the use cases span the gamut. As a company, we’ve identified a  common thread between these use cases: working visually brings clarity to big ideas. The world is only getting more complex—it’s not about who has the best access to information. It’s about who can connect and relate information quickly and use it to push their business forward. Innately, most of us think and communicate visually. An image can convey in seconds what is hard to express in words.

In the modern productivity suite, there’s an application for everything—except our most natural way of thinking. If you have a ledger, you add it in Excel. If you need to type out your thoughts, you turn to a word processor. But we hadn’t figured out a way to digitize the whiteboard, the key to visual thinking, until Lucidchart hit the scene.

At Lucidchart, we want to enhance our natural way of communicating. With our intuitive interface and our ever-growing set of automation features, you can create or generate diagrams quickly so you can spend your time innovating.

Lucidchart hacks to make working visually easy

Nathan’s remarks were followed by two Lucidchart training sessions: one on basic tips and tricks to speed up productivity (or to rickroll your colleagues) and one delving deeper into the automation functions Nathan alluded to.

If you couldn’t make it out to Austin, take a look at some of the highlights from our “Lucidchart Hacks: Tips to 10x Your Effectiveness in Lucidchart” session.

Tip #1: Master swimlanes

You may have used swimlanes in Lucidchart before, but did you know that you can add a swimlane in the middle of the swimlanes you’ve already created? Or change the position of your swimlanes? If not, then we’ve got some new tricks for you to try.

• To add new swimlanes: You can change the number of swimlanes in the advanced shape menu, or right-click a specific swimlane and select “Insert Lane Before” or “Insert Lane After.”
• To move swimlanes: Right-click on a specific swimlane and select “Move Lane Up/Left” or “Move Lane Down/Right.”
• To reorient swimlanes: Select your swimlanes and, in the Properties bar, click the magnet icon. In the advanced shape menu (found above the canvas), choose the vertical or horizontal icon under “Orientation.” If magnetized, your shapes will reorient with the swimlanes.

Tip #2: Get your shapes in line

Many users want to line up their shapes perfectly to make their diagrams look as professional as possible. In Lucidchart, you can accomplish this in a few short steps:

1. Select all of the objects you want to align—either drag and select the objects at once or hold down the Shift key as you select objects individually.
2. Right-click and navigate to “Align.”
3. Choose any alignment from the menu.

But what if you move your shapes? Do you need to realign them again?

Yes, but there’s an easy way to avoid that—we recommend that you group shapes before you move them to keep your shapes in tact.

Tip #3: Go back in time

Lucidchart updates in real time so colleagues can work together easily, but if you want to look back at past processes or if someone made a change they shouldn’t have, you can access previous versions of your diagram with revision history.

In the Dock on the right side of the editor, select the clock icon. Select an item from the list to pull up a previous version of the diagram.

See us live for more tips and insights

And this is just the tip of the iceberg—if you want more ways to use Lucidchart effectively, come out and visit us in a city near you. We’ll see you in Boston, NYC, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, London, and Sydney.

Check out all of our Lucidchart Connect events for 2018.