Visio Org Chart

[Ironman9079]

I'm a sometime user of Visio 2007. My question/problem is related to Org Charts. I'm able to create a company org chart from an Excel file. This Excel file contains employee information, ID, Name, Title, Department, Supervisor ID and Supervisor Name. All good so far.

My question is when a superviosr terminates and employees are reassigned to a new supervisor I am unable to just open the visio file and have the updated file know that employee X now reports to supervisor Y. I get errors. Is this not a function of Visio, to update on the fly?

Also, if I have a given manager that has alot of folks under him (say 200 employees), the layout is really really bad. I'll get shapes that are off the page. I mean really off the page. Is there a way to control that? Thanks....

 

[VisioMVP]

The Orgchart Wizard in Visio is fairly basic. If you need to update, you have to let the wizard rebuild the org chart from the Excel spreadsheet.

There are several options for grouping subordinates, but any of these changes are lost if you rebuild the orgchart with the wizard. One possibility is to break down the large group by areas Finance/East Coast, Finance/Central and Finance West Coast. Then enter
Joe Boss as in charge of Finance
with three new guys reportingto him
Joe Boss EC as in charge od Finance East Coast
Joe Boss Cen as in charge od Finance Central Coast
Joe Boss WC as in charge od Finance West Coast
You can then let the wizard start a new page based on these new personas

John... Visio MVP - Visio.MVPs.org

 

[Ironman9079]

Thanks for the comment. What happens, then, when Joe Boss EC (Finance East Coast) is transfered to Commercial WC, a completely different group? What happens to the employees that reported up to Joe Boss EC after the change? For example in a change like this now all those employees now report to JANE Boss EC. How does Visio handle that?

 

[VisioMVP]

If the structure changes, then the Excel file needs to change. If you keep things simple, you can modify the Visio drawing and export it to Excel. If you modify the Visio drawing after it is generated, most of the changes will be lost when te drawing is regenerated.

If Joe Boss is replaced by Jane Boss, you would need to move the connections from Joe to Jane and correct Joe's reporting line. Alternatively, you could rename Joe as Jane and add a new person in the appropriate reporting structure for Joe.

It is also possible to link the shapes on a Visio drawing to a database, so some of the information can be manipulated outside of Visio.



John... Visio MVP - Visio.MVPs.org