Org charts with database

[Catherine]

I work for at state agency (9,000) employees and we have a
a challenged IT group. Right now staff are maintaining a
visio org chart for these staff by hand entering all the
personal changes directly to the org chart drawings.
I have been reading "inside out" and using Visio ffor a
while and understand that we could create an excel or
access database and use that to update our charts.
However, I run into "nasties" at every turn. IS the data
to large? Is there a better source to "tutor" me through
this? Cna I convert the exisitng visio drawing into a
database or spreadsheet for better updating? can I
interface to another system for auto updates?

 

[John Marshall, MVP]

I did a test with 9000 employees and Visio was able to create the drawing,
but the performance went through the floor. It took over three hours to
create the drawing and once created, took five minutes to move a shape. This
was on a P4 1.6 with 512M. A faster machine with more memory
would help, but you should seriously consider breaking the information down
into separate files.

The Visio Org chart wizard will create a new drawing from an Excel
spreadsheet or create an Excel spreadsheet from an Orgchart. The second
choice would depend on how the Orgchart was created. If the drawing was not
created with the Orgchart stencil, the wizard may not recognize the shapes.

An alternate to the wizard converting the Orgchart to an Excel spreadsheet
is to have someone write some VBA code to loop through all the shapes and
write out the shapes name and who they are connected to.

John... Visio MVP

Need stencils or ideas? http://www.mvps.org/visio/3rdparty.htm
Need VBA examples? http://www.mvps.org/visio/VBA.htm
Common Visio Questions http://www.mvps.org/visio/common_questions.htm