The PowerDesigner Interface

The chapters in this part introduce you to the PowerDesigner® interface and the core concepts available for all kinds of models.

• Getting Started with PowerDesigner
  PowerDesigner is a graphical and easy-to-use enterprise modeling environment.
• Projects and Frameworks
  A project allows you to group together all the models and other types of documents you need for a particular modeling task, and save them as a simple entity in your repository.
• Models
  Models are the basic work unit in PowerDesigner. You must create a model before you can begin modeling. You can group models together in projects and framework diagrams. You can break models down into packages to isolate a part of your model and make it easier to work with.
• Objects
  You populate your models with objects. The types of objects that you can create depend on the type of model that you are working with.
• Diagrams, Matrices, and Symbols
  Most PowerDesigner models contain diagrams, in which your model objects are represented by symbols. You can add a dependency matrix to any model to show relationships between objects.
• Reports
  Reports allow you to publish information about your model, and can be used to provide documentation for your system.
• Comparing and Merging Models
  PowerDesigner provides powerful tools for comparing models and merging them.
• Customizing Your Modeling Environment
  PowerDesigner is highly customizable. You can modify its interface to suit your work habits, , set default naming conventions, change the appearance of object symbols, add new properties to objects, and even create your own types of objects.