Microsoft Visio 2007

Inserting Shapes & Connecting Them

Many of the drawings you will create in Visio will have some sort of relationship between the shapes. For example, if you’re creating a process flow, you will have arrows between the process items. In a network, you will have lines connecting the interconnected devices. Creating these connections is a fairly simple process in Microsoft Visio. For many objects, you can automatically create a connection when you add a shape to the drawing, for other types of drawings, you will need to create the connections manually

Creating an Organization Chart in Visio

We’ll show you how to insert shapes and connect them by building an organizational chart. Let’s start by adding the top, the CEO, and then work down from there:

1. Create a new drawing by selecting New, Business, and then Organization Chart.
2. Add an Executive to the chart by dragging and dropping the shape onto the page.
   
3. Next, add a Manager by dragging a Manager shape onto the drawing and hover it over the Executive. Let the mouse go while the Manager shape is hovering over the Executive and the Manager will become a direct report to the Executive.
   
4. Add 4 more Managers reporting to the Executive and one Assistant by repeating the same process of dragging the shapes and dropping them onto the Executive. Your chart should now look similar to this one:
   
5. Now let’s imagine that the first manager on the left is no longer reporting to the CEO, but to one of his direct reports. You can drag and drop a box onto another box to create a new reporting relationship. We dragged the first manager and dropped him onto the second box, like this:
   
6. We’re going to build out our organization a little so you can see how easy it is to change reporting relationships and manage entire teams of people. When you first build out the organization by dragging and dropping shapes onto one another, Visio does not properly layout the organization chart. Here’s an example of our firm’s executives:
   
7. That’s a pretty big mess to untangle – if we were doing it by hand. But, fortunately, we don’t have to! Visio has that handy Organization Chart toolbar that opened up when we started creating the organization chart. It’s going to come in handy now. Select John Smith, the CEO, and click the second button on the Organization Chart toolbar, the Horizontal Layout button:
   
8. This will fix some of the layout mess in your Visio chart, but it’s not perfect yet, as you can see:
   
9. The CEO’s direct reports look fine, it’s all of those underneath. You can download a copy of this file here if you’re following along. To fix each manager’s organization, you need to select each one and select the best layout option for it. First, select Alexa Jones at the far left. Click on the Vertical Layout button on the Organization Chart toolbar. Select Align Left.
   
10. Now we’ve aligned one of the direct reports. Repeat this process for each manager. In the end, you’ll have a chart that looks like this:
    
11. Congratulations! You’ve created a Visio organization chart in just a few minutes. You can download the final file here if you want to compare it to the one you’re working on.

In this tutorial, you learn how to create an organization chart by dragging and dropping shapes onto other shapes. In this next section, we’re going to explore how to manually connect shapes and how to quickly add a shape to an existing shape on the drawing.