Visio® 2007 Bible

Chapter 14. Working with Organization Charts

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Exploring the Organization Chart template

• Building a simple organization chart

• Constructing an organization chart from existing data

• Laying out shapes

• Rearranging and deleting shapes

• Enhancing the appearance of organization charts

• Editing and deleting shapes

• Distributing departments across multiple pages

• Comparing different versions of a chart

• Reporting on and exporting organization chart data

Real-world organizations come in many shapes and sizes, with both formal and informal reporting structures. In strictly hierarchical enterprises, authority and communication mostly travels up and down official lines of command. But, companies that perform projects often use a matrix structure whereby workers report to project managers for the projects to which they are assigned in addition to functional managers for other assignments and administrative issues.

Organization charts document the formal structure and relationships within an enterprise, from top-level business units, down through functional groups, teams, and individuals. Visio 2007 simplifies the process of creating organization charts whether you build your charts one shape at a time or by importing organizational data from another data source.

Although Visio organization charts look like the hierarchies shown by tree shapes in Block Diagram templates (see Chapter 15) they are much more powerful. The Organization Chart template includes tools and features specifically designed to ...