With Edraw Organizational Chart, you can create clear and comprehensive company organizational charts with no prior experience. Microsoft Visio Using the Org Chart Wizard Learn Microsoft Visio in simple and easy steps starting from basic to advanced concepts with examples including Overview. This tutorial explains how to create a professionallooking organizational chart with SmartDraw. Start with org chart templates and use intuitive smart formatting. Organizational Chart Templates In Visio' title='Organizational Chart Templates In Visio' />Automating Diagrams with Visio. We have all heard the adage, Good, Fast, Cheap Pick any two you cant have all three. The saying might generally be true of the work we produce as designers of information use environments. Try to test the saying against one of the deliverables we might createa high fidelity interface prototype, for exampleand see if you can disprove it. You can produce beautiful prototypes in Illustrator, but it will cost you time and money. You can do rough prototypes quickly and cheaply by hand, but the end result wont look as polished as the Illustrator version. My approach to producing deliverables is to falsify the truism. Organizational Chart Templates In Visio' title='Organizational Chart Templates In Visio' />I do the demanding intellectual work first and then force the tools to succumb to my need to produce seemingly speedy deliverables. The illusion of speed happens because you do the hard work up frontplanning, analyzing and documenting your work in doing content inventories, designing user flow, etc. When it is time to realize that work in a document, the turnaround time can be relatively quick if you push your tools to perform for you. Patch For Corel Draw 12. In this article I illustrate one method for producing diagrams quickly using software. We probably do most of our intellectual work in preparing deliverables before ever touching a drawing program. When the elements of the information architecture and user experience are defined, we are often expected to produce a polished document to visually represent the information. We can take a semi automated approach to produce some of these documents using software. Organizational Chart Templates In Visio' title='Organizational Chart Templates In Visio' />Find out how to create an organization chart in Visio 2010 from an Excel spreadsheet. This feature could save you hours when you have to create an. Site maps and user flow diagrams are good candidates. The process I propose assumes that youve spent grueling hours doing the work of preparing your content inventory or sketching your user flow diagrams and now want to render your boxes and arrows for presentation. The next step in the process is to take the data produced in that intellectual work and prepare it for use in a diagramming application. I will illustrate a process that relies on text files exported from Excel and uses Visio to transform those text files into diagrams. You can also use a database management system for this process, but details about using a DBMS are out of the scope of this article. Creating site maps or content architecture diagrams. We spend a good deal of time working with content to produce documents that help clarify the scope of data contained in websites. Key to the work of information architecture is the production of documents that list the site contents hierarchically content audits or inventories or diagrams that depict the site structure visually site maps. Organizational Chart Templates In Visio' title='Organizational Chart Templates In Visio' />The content inventory is the starting point in defining our information architecture. Graphic designers and technical people often use these documents in system and design specifications. Step 1 Identify and document nodes in a content inventory. The process of specifying new data or auditing existing data to be included in a site helps to clarify the next steps in organizing that data for presentation. The inventory of data is often used to produce taxonomies or categories of access points. These access points usually inform the navigation and interface design. Inventoried content is often categorized as a hierarchy of nodes categories and subcategories, branches and leaves. A high level extraction of the top level nodes, perhaps even several levels deep, might give a good idea of the site structure. To illustrate how to prepare your text files, consider this portion of a hierarchy for a hypothetical company website. Content hierarchy for boxywidgets site. Home. 2. 0 Corporate information. What we do. 2. 2 Who we are. Our process. 3. 1 Discovery. Concept. 3. 3 Creation. Implementation. 3. Rollout. 3. 6 Testing. Blood Pressure Usb Software. Our clients. 4. 1 Case studies. Web. 4. 1. 2 CD ROM and kiosks. Print. 4. 2 Client list. Contact information. Locations. 5. 2 Online inquiry form. Inquiry form submitted. Inquiry form error. This example shows all the available nodes in a small site. All that Visio will need is a listing of the nodes that we want to diagram. This list is comprised of Shape Namea unique numerical idea for each node andShape Texta label for the node. If this data is coming from a more complete content audit document, you should extract only the id and label for this exercise. This is fairly simple to do in Excel if you copy the data to a new sheet and remove the unwanted columns. Visio accepts a number of other values in the file you import. They are as follows Shape,Shape Name,Master Name,Shape Text,Shape. X,Shape. Y,Width,Height,PropertyFor our task, we are interested in the Shape Name and Shape Text values. We can simply skip all of the fields following Shape Text, but must include blank values using empty quotes for any fields that we are skipping before the last field. In this case, we use empty quotes for Master Name because were only using boxes in this diagram. The first value in each line is always the word Shape to indicate to Visio that this is the definition for a shape it will draw. If you are authoring these files in Excel, you can create the first column for the Shape value and auto fill all of your rows with the value Shape. The second column will hold your Shape Name values. The third column will be a placeholder for the empty Master Name field. The fourth column will hold your Shape Text labels. Our sample Excel file would look like this Excel sheet with stripped down content inventory. We can export this sheet to a text file of comma separated values saved as. Shape file for Boxy Widgets site. Shape,1. 0,HomeShape,2. Corporate informationShape,2. What we doShape,2. Who we areShape,3. Our processShape,3. DiscoveryShape,3. ConceptShape,3. CreativeShape,3. ImplementationShape,3. RolloutShape,3. TestingShape,4. Our clientsShape,4. Case studiesShape,4. WebShape,4. 1. 2,CD ROM and kiosksShape,4. PrintShape,4. 2,Client listShape,5. Contact informationShape,5. LocationsShape,5. Online inquiry formShape,5. Inquiry form submittedShape,5. Inquiry form errorAny line that is preceded by a semicolon is ignored as a comment. I added comments in the first two lines to indicate what this file is used for. The next file we want to create is the file that shows relationships between nodes. Step 2 Document nodal connections. The list we created above is a hierarchical listing of nodes, so the numbers and position in the list already indicate relationships. However, Visio requires that we explicitly reiterate the relationships by indicating child parent connections following the format below. Link,Link Name,Master Name,Link Text,From Shape or Connector Name,To Shape or Connector NameWe only need the From Shape and To Shape values for this file. The first value in each line is always the word Link to indicate to Visio that this is how the shape identified in the From Shape field will link to a shape in the To Shape field. Our link file for the example above would look like this. Link file for Boxy Widgets site. Link,1. Link the Home to Corporate informationLink,1. Link,1. Link,1. Link,2. Link Corporate information to child What we doLink,2. Link,3. Link,3. Link,3. Link,3. Link,3. Link,3. Link,4. Link,4. Link,4. Link,4. Link,4. Link,5.