Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Dave Ludwig: Making an org chart isn't a daily occurrence, it's probably something you need
to do maybe a few times a year. But many people face the same question when starting an org
chart. Which app do you use? PowerPoint or Visio? Well we're going to answer that question
today in this webinar. Let's go over the reasons to use PowerPoint for an org chart. It's mainly
for smaller org charts; 30 or less people. When you want to also use PowerPoint-like
features with the org chart, like the animations, PowerPoint's a good way to go of course. And
of course PowerPoint does a great job automatically laying out and sizing your shapes for you.
Dave Ludwig: Reasons for using Visio: You've got 30 or more people, big org charts, like
you could have 30 or more but you could have a hundred, you could have hundreds of people
in these org charts; these are big, massive org charts for lots of people. Another good
reason for Visio is you want to base that org chart on imported data. And then Visio
is a diagramming program, so of course it does a really good job laying out and spacing
things on the page, but it also lets you take control of the layout and spacing as well.
Dave Ludwig: So those are the main reasons, there are other reasons, and you can go to
aka.ms/123org to learn more. Dave Ludwig: Okay, so I'm going to dive in
here, I'm going to share out my screen, and I'm going to use PowerPoint here. Great, so
I've got PowerPoint up, I've got a PowerPoint presentation open here, and this is a all
hands meeting for a fictitious company named Contoso, Contoso is a fake company name we
use a lot at Microsoft for examples. And let's say I'm the boss, I'm going to roll out to
my people this new org, or maybe I'm the boss's admin assistant and I'm making an org chart.
And what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a new slide for this presentation, and I'm
not going to fool around with these layouts here, because org charts are typically big,
expansive diagrams that take room, so I'm going to choose this blank layout here. Then
I'm going to go to the insert tab, and then I'm going to go over here to SmartArt. SmartArt
incidentally is available in PowerPoint but also Excel and Word, and also in Outlook email
messages, so you don't have to use just PowerPoint for SmartArt but PowerPoint is typically the
app people use for org charts, so that's why we're using it. We're going to click Hierarchy
here, and then we have different layout traces here, I'm just going to double click this
first one and get an example here on the page. Dave Ludwig: So PowerPoint slaps in this very
simple example of an org chart, right? You've got like.. let's see, five shapes here with
placeholder text, little brackets to fill in. And it also has a corresponding text pane
over here. So I think a lot of you have probably used this already, it's been around since
2007, but I'll just do a quick review. What you type in here, and I'm going to type in
Paul Chesser, this is another fictitious name here. What I type in here on the right shows
up on the left in the text pane as well. And you can keep going here, you can type in other
names and you'll notice what you type on the right is also reflected in the left. And you
can keep going here, adding text and you can even add shapes under bosses or managers,
like you could go up here to Paul and you could say Add shape, Add shape below, and
that works. Dave Ludwig: But the way I like to use SmartArt,
is I like to blank out this entire text pane here and work purely with the bulleted list,
I find fussing around with the shapes isn't my style, it might be yours, and there's buttons
for that. But this is the way I do it, I blank out all these-- all those on the left, I start
with one big shape for the boss, and I type in "Paul Chesser," there he is. And then I
have my insertion point to the right of Chesser here, and I'm going to press Enter, and that
adds another employee. But how do I get that employee to report to Paul? How do I get him
underneath Paul? I right click and choose Demote, and that puts him under Paul. I'm
not really demoting him, technically, but you get the idea. I'm nesting him under, he's
reporting to Paul. And then I'll press Enter again, and of course just like any other bulleted
list you get another bullet item, and then I'll type another name here; Matthew Armenta,
and then Return to get another employee under Paul, and then I type Jamie, Jamie Philips.
Okay, how's my typing? Do I have any typos? Good.
Dave Ludwig: Okay, so of course if you needed someone else under Edwin, you could press
Return. Let's say Edwin has people reporting to him, you can demote the shape there and
you can say Dennis Wilke, and then another person reporting to him, Jamie Greer, and
so forth and so on, you get the idea. And this is PowerPoint, so I could add animations
to this org chart, I could give it special design themes, there's all sorts of great
things you can do to this chart. Dave Ludwig: However, if it gets to be big,
if you have more than 30 people here in this text pane, it starts becoming a little unruly,
it's hard to manage. And the other thing that's hard is if you want specific layout control,
like you want to move-- excuse me, I don't want to do that, I just want to move Edwin
over. Then I have to do a lot of fussy work with this diagram, and I can move him over
but I can't move Dennis and Jamie over automatically, I've got to do a lot of work there.
Dave Ludwig: So when you find yourself clicking shapes and moving them, positioning them,
aligning them, that's when you want to use Visio. Not only if you're making a big org
chart do you want to use Visio, but if you're also moving things around, Visio's a good
choice. So let's go to Visio. We'll head on over to Visio here, and I'm going to create
an org chart, I'm going to click this option here. And Visio's going to guide me through
the creation process, it assumes I'm making a big org chart here, it's going to use this
wizard to help me out. It's going to ask me, "Do you want to create your organization chart
from a file or a database?" Yes, I do, I want to import data and create this org chart,
I don't want to type all that by hand. There is an option to do that but I don't want to
do that today, I want to import the data. I'll click Next. If your company-- now it's
asking me where the information is stored. Now if your company uses Exchange Server,
this first option is a godsend. I mean you click this, you click Next, it asks you to
choose a manager and then boom, that org chart's created. I mean it's an amazing option, this
top little thing; it looks very innocent this little top option but it's actually very powerful.
Not everyone has Exchange Server so today I'm going to choose this second one here,
we're going to base it on an Excel file. Dave Ludwig: Now earlier I was rehearsing
for this webinar so this path shows up here, but if this was the case for you it probably
would be blank, so you'd need to click "browse" and find the spreadsheet that you're going
to base the org chart on. Let's take a quick look at that spreadsheet here. You can have
all sorts of columns in your spreadsheet for Visio, but the two that are most important
are these two here. The first column here, Employee Name.. the first column, Employee
Name, Visio's going to make a shape for each employee in this spreadsheet, so you've got
to have a name for each employee, so that's pretty obvious, put their name here in this
first column. But then it's going to create this org chart and it's going to say okay,
you know, I'm going to take this employee I'm going to put him under this boss, I'm
going to take this other employee here and put them under this boss. So you've got to
have a column for their boss who they report to here. Now Paul Chesser doesn't have a boss,
he's the president and CEO, so that's going to be blank. But everyone else here has a
boss, so that's important for Visio to have that. Okay we're going to close this, and
we're going to go back to Visio and go ahead and make sure that's chosen here, and then
click Next. Dave Ludwig: Okay, kind of the boring part
of the webinar, so apologies times a thousand here, because this is a wizard, it's not very
visual, we've got this very-- this is the only thing visual here, this funny graphic,
generic graphic over here of an org chart. So bear with me, we'll get to the payoff,
I promise. Visio needs to create this org chart, and it needs to understand in your
spreadsheet where the names come from. So you're going to choose the name column here,
you're going to say, "Oh okay, here are our columns from that spreadsheet." Employee Name
is the name of each employee, and then reports to his boss. So it kind of guessed and found
the right columns for me but if I were to expound on this dialog box, I would talk it
out and I would say, "Okay Visio if you need to find a name then look for it in the Employee
Name column." Visio's going to need to know who that name reports to, look for it in the
Boss column. That's sort of what this dialog box means. And then I'm going to click Next
because I don't have a first name. Now Visio's saying, when I put a shape on the page, do
I need to put some text on each shape? Yes, we do. We need that employee name and-- it
guessed right, we need the employee name and the title, that's going to help us read the
chart and understand who's doing what. I'll click Next. This is about shape data fields,
this is a feature in Visio where you can store information and fields for each shape, I'm
not going to go into detail on that, there's lots of information on office.com about that.
I'm going to click Next. Dave Ludwig: One of the cool things about
PowerPoint and Visio is you can include pictures in an org chart. And in Visio it's pretty
amazing, you can target a folder of pictures, of photos, and as long as those photo file
names are named the same as that spreadsheet I was showing you; so I'll show you this;
I've got all these names here; Addie Burnett, Adrien Hair, Adrian Nall, Alana McMillan,
these are the same names as in that spreadsheet. So when I go back to Visio and I target that
folder here, it's going to automatically sort of lash each photo and attach it to each shape,
so that's pretty cool. Click Next. I'm not going to go too much into this dialog box
here, this is basically if you have around 50 people, choose the first radio button,
if you have a lot, and you need to spread like hundreds of shapes across many pages,
click the second one. Dave Ludwig: And then I'll accept the defaults
here and click Finish. And what's happening now is Visio is taking each row of that spreadsheet,
it's creating an employee shape for each row, it's slapping the title and the name on there,
it's putting a picture and associating that. And it's also of course putting each employee
under the appropriate boss, and there we go. We've got a rather large org chart here, ready
to go in Visio. Dave Ludwig: Now Visio is a layout and a diagramming
tool, so it doesn't really make sense to have this across six pages here, tiled across six
pages, so I'm going to go to the Design tab, and because it's Visio I have lots of control
over its layout, and I'm going to choose something bigger like Tabloid. And then check this out,
I'm going to-- when I move the boss, everyone moves with the boss, sort of like follow the
leader. So if I move him over, the whole chart moves over, all the employees move, which
is really handy. I'll move him to the top here. And I'll get this to-- because it's
Visio I have all these layout controls, I'm going to go up here to the org chart tab and
make things fit a little bit better onto this one tabloid size page here. And do one more
here, see if that works. Bring down the height a little bit. And then I'll move him up a
little bit here. Dave Ludwig: There we go, so we're all fit,
they're all snug onto one page. And we're almost out of time, I'm going to show you
a really quick tip that I think is great. If you want to use these right margins more
here, if you want to spread this stuff out on the page, you can do that. Again, when
you click a boss and move that boss over, all those employees move over. That's not
the case in PowerPoint unless you, you know, actively select all those people. So again,
move the boss and the people with that boss. And then, of course, it's Visio so you've
got all sorts of awesome layout controls, you can distribute these columns evenly across
the page so you've got a big gap here, little gap here. We don't want those differences,
so we're going to spread those out. And we're going to go to position, and distribute horizontally,
and there we've got everything neatly represented on the page there and using all the real estate
of that printed page. Dave Ludwig: Okay, for a complete recording
of this webinar and for more supporting material you can go to aka.ms/123org. And then for
general information about the webinar series go to aka.ms/offweb for information about
our office webinars, we've got our schedule up there, we've got a calendar reminder and
all sorts of good stuff. So check that out when you have a chance. Next week Doug Thomas
will be back and he'll be explaining working with Office on Windows 8. That's one you're
going to definitely want to attend. Find out all sorts of tips and tricks with working
with Office in the new operating system. Dave Ludwig: Special thanks to everyone today;
Doug, Chris, Bruce, Nina, Mary and I think I got everyone. Doug, Chris, Bruce, Mary,
Nina.. Joy! How could I forget Joy Miller? Thanks everyone for helping out today and
stick around for the Q&A, we'll talk about org charts, we'll talk about anything Office,
and come back next week and learn about working with Office in Windows 8.