Org Chart Advice?

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I have been asked how to create organizational charts that exceed the capabilities (as I know them) of MS Org Chart. Other than time-intensive fudging with Word tables or Excel Borders or Auto-shapes, what do you suggest? Or CAN you force Org Chart into new configurations? Thanks
Nora A.

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sanora?

Would Visio do the job?

I don’t know much about the product- you might try posting on the Visio board.

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If you need to stick within the Office suite, then I’d recommend PowerPoint over MSOrgChart – I tested the latter when we moved over to Office, and found it useless for our purposes.

But I’d agree with Geoff, Visio absolutely rules for org charts, if you can get hold of it.

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The project is an infrequent task – it won’t be worth purchasing a new program. MS Organizational Chart is available within either PowerPoint or Word – and that’s what they wanted to use. I just can’t find any way to make it do what they want – such things as 3 branches from the primary “box”, with one of those branches having 8 boxes spread horizontally across the page. This thing has 46 positions. It’s just shaped differently than any available Microsoft styles and bigger than Microsoft planned for these to be. Is there some way to tweak the existing styles into something unique?

Nora A.

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Unfortunately I can’t give any tips on tweaking OrgChart – I ran as fast as I could away from this app!

But what I’d suggest is using PowerPoint’s own drawing tools to build your org chart from scratch. That’s what we do here because we don’t have Visio on our network. The drawing tools in PowerPoint do work pretty well for drawing org charts, albeit not as good as Visio (and btw better than the drawing tools in Word).

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Okay! Using the Autoshapes and connectors was one possibility – it’s nice to have someone confirm that it IS a good way to go. Thanks.
Nora

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You now have 2 confirms. After showing people at my office Ppt’s connectors and autoshapes, it’s unanimous that it is generally preferable (although we are learning to use Visio with 2K). Attorneys get very creative in determining data structure for the org charts… quite outside the “normal” bounds, which renders the org chart tool virtually useless. Maybe that’s why MS purchased Visio???

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One of the plusses with PowerPoint and connectors is the ability to select all of the connectors and then choose Reroute connectors on the Drawing Toolbar. It does a creditable job of lining up spaghetti.

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You might want to look at Smart Draw – http://www.smartdraw.com. It’s quite cheap – $49, and seems to be very powerful and totally compatible with MS applications. I’ve just started playing with it, so don’t take this as a whole-hearted approval, just a suggestion.

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If you’re using Office 97, have you tried upgrading to Draw98 (available from Microsoft as a free upgrade). If you don’t have Ppt, then this will give some extra functionality to Word97

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I think this is just what the doctor ordered for this client! I had never played with MS Draw, and it’s an oversight on my part! Many thanks.
ENA

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Try the free 60 day trial of VISIO. You can get it at http://www.microsoft.com/Office/visio/%5B/url%5D If you like it you can buy it, and if your project is a onetime project, you have a powerful tool to use for 60 days. The trail version should have everything you need for your project.

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