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« "MBAs Open Doors" | Main | We've Lost Francesca » November 14, 2005Visio Org Chart HotnessAs I've been spending some quality time with Visio, I've become increasingly enamored of what the product is capable of. One of the common scenarios that Visio is used for is to create or lay out organization charts (e.g., Manager X has 3 subordinates, each of whom has 2 to 5 direct reports). Visio lets you create org charts manually, of course - just drag the shapes onto the canvas, and the system will builds the connecting lines automatically. But that's not the cool part. No, the cool part is that Visio offers some killer org-chart import tools, which allow you to point Visio at a data source and say, "go" ... and Visio then Does The Right thing by spidering the data and building your org chart for you. Good data sources include things like an Excel workbook, tab-separated text, a SQL database, or Microsoft Active Directory. This is an awesome feature, because it shows off how valuable the visual display of information is relative to, say, a list of items. It's far more compelling to see the structure of Planning as lines and boxes than it is to see some flat, inert Excel spreadsheet. (And, plus, it's automated. Which rocks, because it means less work for users.) If you want to play with this feature yourself, simply create an Organization Chart template in Visio. Go to the "Organization Chart" menu and pick "Import Organization Data..." The Wizard will walk you through the rest. Posted by Gavin Shearer at November 14, 2005 11:20 AM. Posted to MSFT. CommentsHi Gavin- I'm trying to use Visio to dynamically build an org chart in Visio from a SQL db that is our Lawson HR system. The catch I'm running into is that in the employee table, the supervisor is a code, that links to a supervisor table, which has the sup.code and the employee # it represents- So, I need to do some joins, etc. Is there a way to do some SQL code and build it from there on the fly? I know I can do a query into a CSV file and then point Visio to it, but I'd rather hit SQL directly. Posted by: Manley at January 13, 2006 3:33 PM Post a commentThanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out) (If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.) |