Diagram Alignment Guides

This article explains what alignment guides are, what they do, and how to turn them on or off so that manually positioning entities on a diagram feels easier and more precise.

What Are Alignment Guides?

Alignment guides are blue lines that appear while you drag an entity on an ownership diagram. They show you when the entity you're dragging lines up with the edges or centre of another entity nearby, and they gently snap the entity into the aligned position.

If you've used a tool like Figma or Lucidchart, the behaviour will be familiar — they're the same kind of "smart guides" you find in those apps.

Why Use Alignment Guides?

When you reposition entities on a diagram manually (see How to Manually Edit a Diagram), it can be hard to get them to line up perfectly by eye. Alignment guides remove the guesswork:

A horizontal line appears when the top, middle, or bottom edge of the entity you're dragging matches the top, middle, or bottom edge of another entity.
A vertical line appears when the left, centre, or right edge matches another entity's edge.
The dragged entity snaps to the line within a small tolerance — so you don't have to manoeuvre pixel-by-pixel to get a clean lineup.

The result is a tidier diagram with less effort.

What You'll See

While you're dragging an entity:

One or more thin blue lines appear, extending across the canvas through the matching edges.
The dragged entity nudges itself onto the line if you're close to it.
Decorative items on the canvas — the legend, sticky notes, and other annotations — are excluded from alignment, so guides never draw against them.

When you release the entity, the guides disappear.

How to Turn Alignment Guides On or Off

Alignment guides are a personal preference — turning them off only affects you, and the setting follows you across every diagram you open, on any device. Other people in your organisation are not affected by your choice.

Open any ownership diagram.
Click the Settings button on the diagram toolbar.
On the Display tab, scroll to Alignment guides.
Toggle the switch off to hide the guides, or on to show them again.

The change takes effect immediately — you don't need to reload the diagram. The next time you open a diagram on this account, the setting is remembered.

Tips

Leave them on for most work. Even if you don't actively need to align entities, having the guides appear costs nothing and makes the occasional manual nudge much easier.
Turn them off for screenshots or recordings if you find the blue lines distracting while demonstrating a workflow on screen.
Guides also appear when you drag a new entity in from the palette — that's a separate feature that's always on, and turning alignment guides off doesn't disable it.
Guides aren't a substitute for auto-layout. If you find yourself nudging many entities into alignment by hand, see How to Change Diagram Layout — the layout engine will probably do a cleaner job in one click.