Org Chart Maker

About the Org Chart Maker

An org chart shows who reports to whom: each person or position is a card, and lines run from every manager down to their team. This maker lays the chart out for you from a plain list, so there is nothing to drag into place: type one person per line and indent each one under their manager, or paste a table from a spreadsheet with a column that names each person's manager — by name or by employee ID — and the chart redraws as you type.

Cards can show the job title, the department (with a colour per department and a key above the chart) and the size of the team below each manager. Open positions are drawn with a dashed outline. Click a card to see who the person reports to, how many people report to them directly and in total, fold their team away, or start the chart at them to print one department. The Headcount and span of control figures give the headcount, the open positions, the number of levels and the span of control — how many direct reports each manager has. The finished chart downloads as a print-ready PDF from A4 to A2 (or US Letter, Legal and Tabloid), as a PNG or an SVG picture, or as a list of everyone with their team counts — with a Pro pass. Everything happens in your browser.

Common uses

• A company or department structure for a handbook, an induction pack, a board paper or an intranet page.
• Planning a reorganisation or a hiring plan: draw the vacant positions next to the people in post and see how each team grows.
• Checking spans of control and the number of levels before a restructure.
• An org chart from an HR system or a payroll export: export the staff list with each person’s manager, open it here and print it.
• Charts for schools, clinics, charities, clubs and volunteer groups, with roles instead of names where people change often.

Writing the list

Each line is one position: the name, then the job title, then the department, separated by commas, tabs, | or a dash with spaces around it (Ravi Kumar - Sales Manager - Sales). Name (Title) [Department] works too. A line indented further than the line above it reports to that line; lines with the same indentation are colleagues under the same manager. Bullets (-, *, •) and numbers in front of a name are ignored, and an outline numbered 1, 1.1, 1.1.1 takes its levels from the numbers.

• Open positions: write Vacant, Open, TBH or To be hired as the name (the job title stays), or leave the name empty in a table, or put Vacant in a Status column.
• Departments: a person without one takes their manager’s, so you only type it once per team (switch this off under the box).
• Comments: lines starting with # or // are skipped.

Tables, CSV and Excel files

A table has one row per position and a header row. Columns are found by their usual names — Name (or First name and Last name), Job title, Department, Manager or Reports to, Employee ID, and Status — and you can change any of them under Columns. Managers are matched by ID when the manager column holds IDs, and by name otherwise; a manager who is not in the table, or a person given as their own manager, is listed under the box and drawn at the top until it is fixed. Excel (XLSX, XLS) and OpenDocument files are read from their first sheet with data, CSV and TSV files as they are, and a copy from a spreadsheet can be pasted straight into the box. The CSV template shows the columns.

Headcount, levels and span of control

Each manager’s card counts their direct reports (the people who report to them), their whole team (everyone below them, at every level) and the open positions in it. The figures under Headcount and span of control cover the whole organisation, or the branch you started the chart at:

• Positions, people in post and open positions — every card, the filled ones and the vacant ones.
• Levels — from the top of the chart to its deepest card.
• Span of control — the number of direct reports of each manager: the average and the median over all managers, the widest span and whose it is, and how many managers have only one report.
• Departments — how many positions and open positions each department has, and its share of all positions.

Large organisations

The maker reads up to 5,000 rows and draws up to 500 positions at a time, so the chart stays readable and quick. When there are more, it opens the first levels that fit and folds the teams below them, each with a “+” badge giving its size: open the teams you need with their badges (up to 500 positions in all), or pick a person and choose Show the chart from here to draw one department or one manager’s team on its own (a manager with more than 500 direct reports is then drawn with all of them, their own teams folded). When more than 500 people report to no one (a table without a manager column, say), the first 500 are drawn. In a top-down chart, a team of three or more people with no reports of their own is stacked in two columns under its manager, which keeps wide teams narrow enough to print; switch this off under Design to draw every team in one row.

Printing and files

The PDF is one page at the paper you choose, with the chart drawn as sharp vector shapes and real, searchable text, fitted inside 10 mm margins and turned to whichever orientation prints it largest. Under the paper choice, the page tells you how large the names will print and suggests a larger sheet when they would be smaller than 6 points. The PNG is drawn at one, two or three times the chart’s own size on a white, transparent or dark background (very large charts are drawn as large as browsers allow, and the page says so); the SVG opens in browsers and in vector editors. The people list is a CSV file with each position’s manager, level, direct reports, team size and open positions, which opens in Excel, Google Sheets or LibreOffice.

Limitations

• Each position has one manager: dotted-line and matrix reporting, assistants placed to the side and shared positions are drawn as ordinary reports.
• Up to 5,000 rows are read and up to 500 positions are drawn at once; larger charts are shown a few levels, a few opened teams or one branch at a time.
• The PDF is a single page; very large charts print with small names, so the page suggests a larger paper size or a smaller part of the chart.
• Cards hold a name, a job title, a department and team counts; photos, phone numbers and custom fields are not shown.
• Names and titles in scripts the PDF fonts cannot shape (such as Devanagari, Arabic, Chinese or Thai) are drawn into the PDF as sharp pictures of the text, so they print correctly but cannot be selected or searched in the PDF.

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