Tuesday, 19 July 2016

Visio: Create an enormous org chart on a huge page

Visio has a lovely wizard that lets you automatically create an org chart from an Excel spreadsheet, or directly from Exchange.

However, if you have a large number of people, the wizard likes to chop up your tree into many pages, based on its own understanding of what will fit.

I actually want one single enormous tree on one enormous page. The wizard does not appear to handle, this, but it's actually really possible.
  1. Create a dummy org chart:
    1. Click New.
    2. Choose the template named Organization Chart Wizard, then click Create.
    3. Follow the steps to create the org chart from your data source.
  2. Delete the org chart that was created.
  3. Click Design, Size, than choose the page size and orientation that you want. For example, switch to A3 landscape.
  4. Create the real org chart:
    1. Click the Org Chart tab.
    2. Click Import to open the Org Chart Wizard again.
    3. On the penultimate wizard page, choose I want to specify how much of my organization to display on each page.
    4. On the last wizard page, ensure that only the most senior person appears in the Employee at Top of Page table.
    5. Click Finish.