Chapter 10. Visualizing an Organization

Businesses are busy enough with tasks other than sketching employee organization charts. Nevertheless, the sketching still needs to be done. Microsoft Office Visio 2007 can help you with this task. Organizational charts give you a graphical view of different relationships, such as reporting structure and individual responsibilities. To make things even easier, Office Visio 2007 serves up an Organizational Chart Wizard and Organizational Chart templates. You can get the most out of your chart by storing data in your chart with each employee shape, and the Organization Chart Wizard makes storing this data easy. This information, for example, could be date of hire, e-mail address, responsibilities, or even the employee’s favorite college football team. You can print reports using this data, display the information on the organization chart itself, and even export it to a spreadsheet or database file.

The way you work with organization charts in Visio 2007 is different from other similar-looking diagrams, such as flowcharts. This chapter tells you what you need to know to create and import organization charts efficiently and successfully.