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Organisation charts

An organisation chart is a useful tool which lets you graphically display the reporting lines of staff within all or part of a business. At a glance it shows the various sections and either the names of the departments or the actual names of staff.

Excel contains a set of drawing objects which can simplify the process of drawing Organisation charts.

Open the drawing toolbar (menus: View | Toolbars | Drawing) - it will typically display at the bottom of your Excel window. On the Autoshapes sub menu there are two sub menus for Flowcharts and Connectors. These contain the tools required for drawing the charts. By opening a sub menu, selecting and dragging the blue bar at the top of the box away from the main menu, these options can be temporarily detached and made available on your worksheet.

The plain rectangle flowchart object should normally be sufficient for creating organisation charts. Click on the shape on the menu dialog and then click on the worksheet to put it in position. If two boxes are placed on a sheet a connector line can be used to attach them.

After selecting the connector line, when the cursor is moved over a rectangle object, small marks will appear on the mid points of each side. Move the cursor over one of the marks and click to attach one end of the line to it. Then repeat the process to attach the other end of the line. Once both ends of the line have been attached the line will adjust and follow the box if it is moved.

Creating the charts can be a bit laborious when attempting to drag to space and align all of the boxes. Fortunately Excel can assist with this task. While holding the <Shift> key click on a few boxes. They should all remain highlighted. On the Drawing toolbar, the Draw sub menu has an option to Align or Distribute the selected objects.

It can be a slow process to draw all of the boxes in a chart and fix their positions and contents. If you need to build a series of charts it is possible to use a macro to draw them based on a list of data.

This page is not included in the Excel functions guide.