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PC World
Chart Your Organization
Create org charts and publish them to the Internet.
By Yardena Arar
May 2002
HumanConcepts' market-leading OrgPlus has long
been one of the most intuitive and powerful tools for producing
organizational charts. And the newest version, OrgPlus 4 Professional,
is more Web-friendly than ever: Not only can you easily publish
a chart to the Internet or a corporate intranet, but your colleagues
can manipulate it. Using a Web browser (Netscape 4 or IE 4 or later),
they can zoom in and out, print selected branches, or even export
the chart back to an OrgPlus file.
Longtime users of Microsoft Office may know
OrgPlus; Microsoft licensed earlier versions to add organizational
chart-making capabilities to its flagship productivity suite. While
the basic tools still exist in Office, OrgPlus 4 Professional offers
many extras.
In addition to the Web publishing features,
the program lets you turn a chart into a PowerPoint slide or a Word
booklet with a table of contents. You can automatically generate
charts from data in Excel, text, or even XML format. The software
offers more than 20 templates with different backgrounds, colors,
and layout styles to make your chart look more professional. You
can even split off a portion of your chart and link it to the original
chart, making it easy to move between the two.
In my tests with a shipping version of OrgPlus
4 Professional, I was able to create a small org chart and publish
it to the Web in less than half an hour--all without having to spend
much time with the very complete manual. OrgPlus 4 Professional
is only for companies that are serious about charting. If you don't
need the new publishing and data import tools, OrgPlus 4 Standard
offers much of the basic capability.
Buying Information
HumanConcepts OrgPlus 4 Professional
Powerful, easy-to-use tool is worth the premium price for companies
that rely heavily on organizational charts.
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