In today’s economy, you might need a printed program to help you identify your boss after the latest round of corporate reorganizations. While we can’t offer much help with the overall corporate culture, we can help you create documents that clearly show corporate reporting structures.

PowerPoint’s built-in organizational charts provide a quick way to depict reporting relationships of people, business units, and more for everything from departments of a few employees to large groups. Rather than manually creating a graphic out of several boxes and lines—or even using an all-purpose prefab graphic—use the organization chart feature, grab your company info, and drop it into the appropriate slots.

Create The Chart

On the Insert tab, click SmartArt and then Hierarchy in the dialog box. Several of the hierarchy diagrams may look like they could work, but for true org chart features (such as a box designed to indicate assistants), click the actual Organization Chart option and OK. PowerPoint inserts a basic org chart with one manager, one assistant, and three employees. To add more shapes, click the Ribbon’s Design tab and click the bottom half of the Add Shape button. On the drop-down list, you can choose Add Shape After to insert a new shape on the same level and to the right of the currently selected object. Add Shape Before places the new shape to the left of the selected object. Use Add Shape Above and Add Shape Below to add supervisors or subordinates to the selected object. The Add Assistant button inserts a box below the active one but to the side rather than on the same level as the box’s other subordinates.

With all of your required boxes in place, it’s time to add text labels to each box. You can click in the text box on each shape and type your information. After you click outside the box, PowerPoint automatically sizes the text to fit in the box. As you enter other names in other boxes, PowerPoint resizes all the text to match the smallest font. (If your team includes a name like “Howard Szcyewskiwitz,” every name on the chart will get the same small font required to make Howard’s name fit.) Keep in mind that you can cut names and titles from a program like Word and paste them into boxes to speed up the data entry and prevent errors.

Rather than clicking each box and entering text, you may find it easier to use the Text Pane. To see the pane, click the Design tab on the Ribbon and click the Text Pane button. This box lets you type information next to a series of bullets, each of which represents a box in the org chart. It can be a little quicker to work with since you can move among boxes with the arrow keys rather than clicking each box with the mouse.

You’ll also discover that the Text Pane provides a quick way to add more boxes to the chart. If you click at the end of a text line and press ENTER, PowerPoint inserts another box on the same level as the one you were on. Highlight an empty line and press DELETE to remove the box from the diagram.

Add Style

As you’d expect with a preformatted graphic, you can quickly adjust the look of a PowerPoint org chart. The org chart’s hanging layout design lets you alter all the objects below the selected object. Click a supervisor’s box, for example, and then click the Design tab’s Layout button and choose one of the horizontal or vertical arrangements.

Click the Design tab’s Change Colors button to choose from a variety of color themes. Hovering the mouse pointer over a theme previews how it would look on your actual chart. When you spot a color theme you like, check out the various outline and gradient options available for each theme. SmartArt styles offer a little more thorough makeover to your chart by changing touches such as shading, beveled edges, and 3D effects.

While all these quick-change packages are handy, don’t forget that you can individually edit any item in a chart. To change a box’s color, for example, select it, and then go to the Ribbon’s Home tab and use the Shape Fill button to choose a new color.