How to Create an Organization Chart in Power BI

Building an organization chart in PowerPoint or Visio can feel like a chore, but creating one in Power BI turns a static diagram into a dynamic, interactive dashboard. Instead of just showing who reports to whom, a Power BI org chart can connect to your other business data, stay updated automatically, and unlock deeper insights about your company's structure. This article will walk you through, step-by-step, how to prepare your data and build a professional, interactive organizational chart right inside Power BI.

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Why Bother Making an Org Chart in Power BI?

You might be wondering why you should use a business intelligence tool for a simple org chart. The difference is moving from a static document to a live, data-driven tool. A traditional org chart is outdated the second someone is hired or changes roles, and it's completely disconnected from your other people analytics.

Here’s what you gain by creating it in Power BI:

• Automatic Updates: When you connect your org chart to a live data source, like a SharePoint list, SQL database, or even a cloud-hosted Excel file, it updates automatically as your source data changes. No more manual edits every time there's a promotion or new hire.
• Interactivity: Users can click on different people or departments within the chart to filter other visuals on the report. For example, clicking on a sales manager could instantly update charts to show that specific team’s performance, headcount, or open roles.
• Deeper Context: You can embed additional data directly into the chart. Hovering over an employee's card could reveal their job title, department, start date, or even performance metrics. This blends your company directory with a resource for People Ops analytics.
• Centralization: Instead of having company structure saved in a PowerPoint slide buried in a shared drive, you have a single source of truth within your Power BI environment that everyone can access.

Step 1: Preparing Your Data

Before you open Power BI, the most critical step is structuring your employee data correctly. No visual can create a hierarchy without a clear roadmap. The foundational requirement is a table that defines the relationship between an employee and their manager.

Your data source (whether it's an Excel sheet, a view in your HR system, or a database table) must contain at least two essential columns:

1. A Unique Identifier for Each Employee: This could be an employee ID number, an email address, or their full name (as long as every name is unique).
2. A Manager Identifier: This column identifies the manager of that employee, using the same type of identifier. For a given employee row, the value in the "Manager ID" column must correspond to a value in the "Employee ID" column.

The person at the top of the hierarchy (like the CEO) usually has a blank or NULL value in their manager field since they don't report to anyone within the structure.

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Example Data Structure

Here’s what a simple data table in Excel might look like. We’ll use both names and IDs for clarity, though you only need one set of unique IDs and manager IDs to make it work.

In this example:

• EmployeeID is our unique identifier.
• ManagerID is our parent or manager identifier.
• Lisa Smith's row has a ManagerID of 1020, which links her directly to Ben Carter's EmployeeID.
• Jasmine Rivera is the CEO, so her ManagerID field is empty.

Once you have this structure, connect Power BI to your data source. You can do this from the Home ribbon by clicking Get data and selecting your source, like Excel Workbook, SharePoint folder, or SQL Server.

Step 2: Downloading the Right Custom Visual

Surprisingly, Power BI doesn't have a built-in, native visual for creating organization charts. To get started, you’ll need to download a free one from the AppSource marketplace.

The most popular and effective one is called "Organization chart" developed by MAQ Software. It's stable, free, and gives you plenty of customization options.

How to Add a Custom Visual

1. In the Visualizations pane on the right, click the three-dot menu (...) at the bottom.
2. From the dropdown menu, select Get more visuals.
3. A new window will open showing Power BI's AppSource. Use the search bar to look for "Organization Chart."
4. Find the visual by MAQ Software and click Add.
5. Once added, you'll see a new icon for the organizational chart appear in your Visualizations pane, ready to be used.

Step 3: Building and Configuring Your Org Chart

With your data loaded and the custom visual installed, you’re ready to build the chart. This part is surprisingly fast once the groundwork is done.

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Map Your Data to the Visual

First, click the new "Organization chart" icon in the Visualizations pane to add it to your report canvas. Then, with the new visual selected, you’ll see several data fields (called "field wells") where you can drag and drop your data:

• Parent ID: Drag your manager identifier column here. Using our example, this would be ManagerID.
• ID: Drag your unique employee identifier here. This must match the type of data in the Parent ID field, so we'll use EmployeeID.
• Display Name: Drag the employee name column you want to see displayed on the cards. This would be the Name column.
• (Optional) Tooltips: This is where you can add extra context. Drag any other useful data fields here, like Title or Department. Now, when you hover over an employee card, this information will pop up.

As soon as you drag the identifiers into the Parent ID and ID fields, the visual will immediately render the hierarchy. It reads your relationships and automatically arranges everyone into the correct structure.

Customizing and Formatting Your Chart

Your raw org chart needs a bit of polishing to look professional. Select the visual and click the paintbrush icon (Format your visual) in the Visualizations pane to access its settings.

Here are some of the most useful formatting options:

1. Nodes

This section controls the appearance of the employee cards themselves.

• You can change the background and font color to match your company branding.
• If you want to display the job title or department directly on the card instead of just in a tooltip, you can assign those data fields to the Sub-Title field well on the format menu.
• Adjust font sizes and padding to make sure the text is readable.

2. General Layout

The visual defaults to a top-down layout, but you might prefer a different orientation.

• Under the General settings, you can often find options to change the direction from vertical to horizontal.
• Here, you can also control interactions, like whether users can expand and collapse nodes by clicking the plus/minus icons on managers.

3. Add Detail with Slicers

A great way to make your org chart more useful is to pair it with a slicer. For example, add a Slicer visual to your canvas and drag the Department field into it. Now, users can click "Marketing" or "Sales" in the slicer, and the org chart will instantly zoom in and filter to show only that branch of the company.

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Advanced Tip: Adding Employee Photos

For an extra professional touch, you can add images to each person's card in the chart. To do this, you first need a column in your data source that contains a publicly accessible URL for each employee’s photograph.

1. Prepare Your Data: Add a new column to your table called something like ImageURL and fill in the links.
2. Set the Data Category: In Power BI's Data view, select this new column. Then, in the top ribbon under the Column tools tab, open the Data category dropdown and select Image URL. This tells Power BI that these text links should be treated as images.
3. Add to Visual: Go back to your report. Some versions of the MAQ custom visual might have a dedicated image field well. Drag your now-categorized ImageURL column into that well.

If your specific org chart visual doesn’t support embedded images directly, an alternative is to select a card in the chart and have it show the image in a separate "Card with states" visual by OKViz for the specific highlighted employee.

Final Thoughts

By moving your organizational chart into Power BI, you transform it from a rigid, quickly outdated document into an insightful and interactive analytics tool. Preparing your data with a clear parent-and-child relationship is the key, but once you have that, you can tap into Power BI's visualization and interactivity features to bring your company structure to life.

While Power BI is a great tool for analyses like this, sometimes just getting all your different employee, finance, and company data into one place is half the battle. That’s a foundational challenge we built Graphed to solve. We pipe your data across dozens of different applications - from CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot to financial and HR systems - into one streamlined console. From there, you just ask questions in plain English and we build live dashboards for you that show exactly what’s happening in your sales activity, marketing, and company-wide performance without anyone on the team needing to log in and out of a bunch of disparate tools ever again.