Understanding Flowchart Symbols

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to talk a little bit about flowchart symbols. Now flowchart is basically a diagram that can be used to make decisions that will be fairly complex and it allows you to basically diagram what route you're going to take based upon every decision that you have to make. Let's go to our computer and I'm going to actually open up a little small flowchart diagram. This is a fairly simple one. And the process that we're looking at here which is this little icon right here, basically a square or any kind of rectangular item in a flowchart is called a process. In this case the process is lamp doesn't work. That is the main process that we're trying to decide what we're going to do with. So, our lamp doesn't work and as you can see there's an arrow going down to the very first decision regarding that problem. So, and that decision asks, is the lamp plugged in? And every decision in a flowchart has yes or no or it could be the results of some type of calculation like A, B or C. Just basically the results of a decision are an arrow coming out of your decision and then the text that describes what that arrow means. In this case there's an arrow pointing to this other process and that arrow says, no. Therefore the lamp is not plugged in. What do you do in that case? You plug in the lamp. Now that decision is pointing to another process or it could point to another decision. And as you can see that's how it allows you to traverse through this tree to decide what you're going to do in very complex situations. Now if the lamp was plugged in, this time we're going to another decision. Is the bulb burned out? Yes, replace the bulb. If not, buy a new lamp. Now you can make up to two decisions with this particular flowchart, is the lamp plugged in and is the bulb burned out. So it allows you to plan in advance the types of decisions you're going to make and what the results of those decisions will be. My name's Dave Andrews and I've just talked to you a little bit about flowchart symbols."