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There's more to Visio than organisational charts - part 1

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4th Feb 2009
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MONITORIf you think a picture's worth a thousand words, then Microsoft Office Visio is definitely the tool for you. Trevor Eddolls presents an introductory tutorial.

Neurolinguistic programming (NLP) guru, Richard Bandler, divides learners into those who are auditory, those who are kinaesthetic, and those who are visual. And NLPers are the first to admit that most people are a combination of all three, which means that almost everyone can learn something from a picture or diagram. This is where Microsoft Visio can be so useful.

Microsoft Office Visio 2007, to give it its full title, is drawing and diagramming software that can, hopefully, communicate information at a glance. In fact, Visio is able to provide more than simple static pictures, it's possible to connect data to a diagram, which can then be displayed by the click of a mouse button. And there is so much more you can do with Visio than just create organizational diagrams – although, it does do that task very well.

Starting a new Visio drawing

Many people are put off using Visio in the first place because it looks complicated. They have a click around and nothing much seems to happen. So, let's start at the very beginning for people who've never really got to grips with Visio and don't know how much fun (yes, and productive and useful work) they can have with the product.

Let's suppose you want to draw a flowchart. You've started Visio, what do you do next? All those menus and icons, where should you click to actually make something happen?

There are a number of ways. Firstly, you could click on the down arrow next to the New document icon. From there you can select what type of diagram you want to draw:


The second way is to use the menu. Click on File-New and then go to the type of diagram you want.

The third way works if you have already created a template and you want to use that.

Newcomers to Visio won't have a template unless they've inherited their use of Visio from someone who used this facility.

Accessing a template from the menu uses File-New-New Drawing from Template.

Selecting a diagram type will result in a drawing area and a stencil area (shown, left, where it will appear in your Visio screen).

The left-hand palette contains multiple stencil options. Clicking on any of the headings will then display the pre-drawn shapes available.

The final information for a new Visio user is to click on a shape and drag it onto the drawing area. You’re now ready to create your first flowchart/office diagram/organisational hierarchy/or whatever.

Visio's bread and butter: organisational charts

The reason many people use Visio is so that they can have nicely drawn organisational charts. As before, the first thing to do is select the appropriate stencils (follow the menu hierarchy shown on the right).

Let's add the MD (or CEO or whoever is at the top of the hierarchy). You do this by dragging the Executive shape from the stencil and dropping it on the drawing area:


Adding the Executive shape

Now, let's assume in my company the MD has three senior managers who report to him. This time, select Manager from the stencil and - this is the clever part of the tip - drop it on top of the Executive shape already on the drawing area. Do this twice more. By dropping the Manager shape over the Executive shape box, Visio will automatically connect them to the Executive at the same level of the hierarchy.

We could add job titles and the individuals’ names by overtyping the words in the boxes.

Now, in my company, the MD has an assistant, a PA, who is not senior in the traditional hierarchical sense, but if she phones with instructions, you know they have come straight from the boss. So where can she be put? Not level with our senior managers, so what? Well the answer is built into Visio. Firstly, we need to move down the three managers. We can do this by selecting them and dragging them down the page. They are still connected, but now there is a longer link between them and the MD. Next we select Assistant from the template and drop it over the Executive box. The MD’s PA is now shown in the hierarchy, as illustrated below:


The next problem occurs when we want to show the staff reporting to each of our managers. The diagram will get fairly cluttered when all the extra boxes are added. The next thing is to drag the managers' boxes apart. The Shape-Align Shape and Shape-Distribute Shape menu commands can help you here (see Part 2 of this tutorial). The next stage is to drag various staff members’ boxes over their appropriate manager. Let's assume each manager has three staff. Figure 6 shows how we could arrange the results.

For the first manager, in the Organisation chart box, I selected Align right from Vertical layout picture.

For the second manager I selected Align left.

And for the third manager, I didn't select anything.

This illustrates that staff can be shown going down the page, they don't have to be spread out horizontally. This is particularly useful if you have a fairly flat hierarchy and need to fit in lots of people.

Another useful tip: rather than colour the boxes in individually, use the Themes.

You can also add a team frame around certain groups of workers.

As a final tip, to make the organisational chart look nice, select a background from the Stencil palette on the left of the screen, drag it on to the drawing area, and select the Send to Back option from the Shape-Order menu command. The result is shown below:


Spreading an organisational chart over two pages

What happens if you need to spread a chart over two pages? Let's suppose that the person in the far right box actually heads up a small division located in France and is quite separate from the main structure. How can you show the French team all together and separate from the main chart, but also linked to the main chart?

The process is quite simple. From the menu choose Insert-New Page. Go back to the first page and right-click on the box for the person who is to be the link to these extra staff members. Select Format and Behaviour – see right:

Select the Double-Click tab and choose Go to page 2 – see below.


Now, when anyone double-clicks on that individual they will go to page 2. Here the hierarchy for France can be drawn. The box at the top of page 2 can be hyperlinked to come back to page 1.

As a final tip: just like you probably do with Excel, you can add comments to a Visio drawing. Insert-Comment opens a comment box. For an organisational chart, you may want to put a date or some other important information in the comment box – something that would be useful for you next time or for the next person to do your job! It can be useful to add comments about hyperlinks to different pages, noting why it was needed or which page it hyperlinks to. An example of a comment is shown in Figure 10.

To be continued...

About the Author

Trevor Eddolls is MD of iTech-Ed Ltd, a company specialising in IT consultancy and writing. He has more than 25 years of experience in all aspects of computing. He is a qualified Microsoft Office Specialist Master Instructor (MOS MI) and publishes a weekly blog, Mainframe Update.

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