Photo Org Charts with SmartDraw
Reviewed: Geetesh Bajaj
January 14th 2005
February 25th 2009
Photos in Org Charts
One of SmartDraw's easiest features is the creation of quick organization
charts that include photographs. Such photo org charts require that
SmartDraw's Image Plug-in is also installed.
Above visuals is from SmartDraw.com
The Image Plug-in is part of the SmartDraw 7 Suite and can be purchased separately if you use another (or older) version of SmartDraw. If you don't have SmartDraw installed, you can download a free 30 day trial version of the SmartDraw Suite here that includes the Image Plug-in...
The Photos
Once you have the full or trial version of SmartDraw Suite installed, you can follow the rest of this tutorial. By the end of this tutorial, we'll create a photo org chart that will be inserted inside a PowerPoint slide - download the finished slide here...
It goes without saying that we need photos to create photo org charts - since I needed photographs of people I could share with all of you without any royalty problems, I cooked up my own pictures using the Fusion part of ScanSoft's SuperGoo. Look at them here:
A Tutorial
- Start SmartDraw and opt to create a blank org chart.
- Draw two rectangles of the same width.
- Align them one over the other while making sure there widths
are the same.
- Select the bottom rectangle and type some text. Then right-click
the top rectangle and choose Photo Frame Properties from the
resulting context menu.
In the Photo Frame Properties dialog box, place a check mark next to both the top options (see screenshot). Leave other options unaltered.
- You'll end up with a photo frame and a text frame. Select both
of them and choose Arrange | Group.
- Select the grouped rectangles and select Edit | Copy (or Ctrl
+ C). Thereafter, paste this 7 times by choosing Edit | Paste
(or Ctrl + V) seven times. Rearrange all your grouped rectangles
as required or refer to this screenshot.
- Ungroup a single group of two rectangles and double-click the
top Photo Frame shape. This will activate SmartDraw's Image Plug-in.
Browse to the folder where you saved the downloaded
pictures and insert them in the Photo Frame. SmartDraw might
ask you if you want to replace the current content with the new
image. Click Yes.
Type the name and designation of the person in the bottom text rectangle. Select both the rectangles and group them again.
- Similarly, add pictures and text for the remaining grouped
rectangles.
- Connect all the grouped shapes as required with SmartDraw's
connectors.
- Save your SmartDraw org chart. Then choose File | Export and
save to an EMF graphic.
- In a new of existing PowerPoint presentation, insert the EMF
graphic. Here's how our photo org chart looks like.
Download a copy of this presentation....
More in PowerPoint
You can take this further in PowerPoint.
- Select the graphic inside PowerPoint and choose Draw | Ungroup
in the Drawing toolbar.
- PowerPoint will warn you that this is an imported graphic
and not a group - do you want to convert it to a Microsoft drawing
object. Click Yes.
- Once this is ungrouped, you can individually animate all the components to create a photo org chart with an animated build.
More in SmartDraw
In SmartDraw, you can use existing org chart templates as an alternative to drawing everything from scratch.
Also look at the how you can create better org charts in SmartDraw...
Learn more about using SmartDraw content within PowerPoint in another Indezine article...
Read an interview with Paul Stannard, the CEO of SmartDraw.com elsewhere on this site...
