How to make an org chart from Excel (and why SmartArt stops working at 40 people)

SmartArt hierarchy works for a leadership slide: a dozen boxes, typed by hand, laid out in a shape you control. It has no connection to your roster, so every hire means editing shapes.

Visio data-linked diagrams genuinely read a spreadsheet, but they need a Visio licence, a Windows desktop and someone willing to maintain the data link. That is a real answer for large IT-supported organisations and a poor one for everyone else.

Past roughly 40 people, boxes overflow the page, the layout has to be redone after each change, and the file only exists on one person's laptop.

Keep one row per person and these columns: name, title, email, manager, department, location, phone. Only name and title are required; email and manager are what make the chart correct.

Header spelling is matched loosely — "Full Name", "Job Title" and "Reports To" all land in the right place, so you do not have to rename anything. Extra columns are ignored rather than rejected.

Put the manager's email in the manager column wherever you can. Names work, but two people called Chris Miller will cost you fifteen minutes later.

In Excel: File → Save As → CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited). Choosing plain CSV instead of the UTF-8 variant is the usual cause of mangled accented names.

In Google Sheets: File → Download → Comma-separated values (.csv). Download the single sheet that holds the roster, not the whole workbook.

Start from the free template if you would rather not rearrange an existing export.

The import runs in two passes — people first, reporting lines second — so the file does not need to be sorted top-down. Re-importing the same file updates existing people by email instead of duplicating them, which is what makes a monthly refresh a two-minute job rather than a rebuild.

Want to see the shape before signing up? Drop a file into the free org chart maker — it renders in the browser and nothing is uploaded.