PC Magazine

Publish Organizational Charts
April 23, 2002
By Kathy Yakal

Product: OrgPlus 4.0 Professional
Requires: 16MB RAM, 30MB hard drive space, Microsoft Windows 98 or later
Company Info: Human Concepts LLC, 888-821-1261, www.humanconcepts.com
Editor Rating:

Organizational charts are not just for seeing who's above and below you in your company. They are essential for effective communication and indispensible in times of reorganization.

OrgPlus 4.0 Professional, from Human Concepts, is designed for companies with 50 or more employees. This robust tool imports data from a generous number of formats, creates multi-level organizational charts, and lets you publish them to intranets, the Web, PowerPoint presentations, and Microsoft Word. (A lite version, in fact, is included in Microsoft Office versions prior to XP as its organizational chart tool.) If your company is large enough to need a specialized tool for this type of charting and needs more than Office offers, there is no need to consider any other option. And if you don't need the publishing tools, you can snag the standard version.

The program's data import wizard makes it easy to import data you've already created in TXT, XLS, XML, or OPX (OrgPlus) format. Or you can enter data directly into the chart templates provided. Best of all, you truly don't have to have design skills to use OrgPlus Pro: Select a chart background and style, and start typing names and titles into the chart boxes. You can add links to e-mail, Web pages, and other charts. Click on a box and you can easily import a picture. In case your organizational chart is very complex and contains elements like salary or budgets, OrgPlus Professional also offers calculation tools that can handle numerical data.

When you're ready to publish your chart, OrgPlus Pro supplies a wizard to help you through the process. If you're publishing to an intranet or the Web, for example, you select the fields that will appear, edit headers and footers, and specify the destination. The chart is then displayed in your browser. The process is similar for a PowerPoint presentation or Word document.

The program isn't perfect, however. For starters, you'll have to become acquainted with some unfamiliar interface conventions to set up the relationships among managers, subordinates, and departments. And during our tests on a fairly powerful computer, the program chugged along a bit slower than it might have. Still, OrgPlus 4.0 Professional does a fine job of charting an organization.