Three Ways You Can Use Visio To Turn Your Org Chart Into A Strategic ...

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As organizations grow, their organizational charts become more critical to the business—and also more complex and harder to maintain. HR professionals, COOs, and other operational leaders build org charts to illustrate and codify hierarchical relationships, reporting structures, employee and manager titles and rankings, and other aspects of an enterprise. That means gathering a lot of data from every single place in the organization: names, titles, roles, email addresses, phone numbers—maybe even metadata on job tenure and career experience.

Then it’s time to choose an appropriate layout and build a professional diagram that meets internal, industry, and compliance standards. Finally, you must keep your org chart continually updated to reflect your dynamic, growing business.

What if you could streamline all that effort, simplify all the complexity, make your org chart easier to share, and link it to data in ways that help you extract valuable business insights?

Here are three ways you can do just that with Microsoft Visio.

1. Create org charts directly in Excel

To build or update org charts, HR and operations teams often start by gathering the appropriate data and organizing it in an Excel worksheet. After all that, they then begin manually building an org chart from the gathered data. But with Visio, once you’ve finished the Excel worksheet, you’re just a few clicks away from a completed org chart.

With the Visio Data Visualizer add-in for Excel, you can create high-quality org charts—all the shapes, connections, and data linking—from data in Excel tables. The Data Visualizer add-in comes with a variety of data-linked samples that provide you with a range of layout styles and theme options.

Data Visualizer Add-in Org Chart Template

Additionally, each diagram option comes with an editable sample data table in Excel to help you get started. For example, when you select an org chart option, you can add employee IDs, modify employee names, insert titles or role types, and more—and easily replace the sample data with your own. Try the ‘Hybrid’ sample if you have a large number of employees within your organization.

Here’s an exciting benefit of the add-in—no Visio subscription is required. So, all Office 365 subscribers can easily view, print, and share org charts with other Office 365 users.

2. Automatically generate a chart from an existing data source

In addition to an Excel spreadsheet, Visio also lets you import data directly from other data sources into Visio with an easy-to-use wizard. In just minutes, you’ll have a complete org chart with shapes, icons, pictures, metadata, notations, units, teams, and reporting structures automatically organized and visualized into a chart that’s easy to read and understand at a glance.

When you click to create a chart from the template, the Organization Chart Wizard starts. On the first page of the wizard, select information that's already stored in a file or database, then follow the directions in the wizard. The org chart wizard lets you choose from four data sources, namely: Microsoft Excel worksheet, Text file, Microsoft Exchange Server directory, or ODBC-compliant data source.

Data Visualizer Org Chart Data Mapping

You can now link your org chart to other files such as a process diagram—or to other analytical tools such as Power BI—to create powerful real-time dashboards to gather insights.

3. Connect your Visio org chart to Power BI

When you connect your Visio org chart to Power BI, you can link your organizational structure to visualizations from complex data sets on sales revenue, budget adherence, and other business-performance KPIs. Connect Power BI revenue graphs directly to your org chart to compare relative performance among sales teams and individual reps. Link workflows to your org chart to help identify and remediate structural bottlenecks. Connect your org chart to a global map in Power BI to locate top-performing managers at a glance.

Power BI Visio Visual

When you add Power BI business intelligence capabilities to your Visio org charts, you’ll be able to quickly identify and locate all kinds of issues, understand their causes, enhance business insight, and take actions that improve outcomes and increase operational efficiency.

From a useful snapshot to a valuable insight engine

Create accurate, detailed business diagrams—and turn those diagrams from useful documents into insight engines. Learn more about how you can use Microsoft Visio to create, share, and edit diagrams, org charts, flowcharts, engineering designs, and more.

For questions about how to create powerful org charts with Visio, email us at tellvisio@microsoft.com. Stay current on new features and releases by following us on Facebook and Twitter, and engage with us on the Visio Tech Community.