Creating Organizational Charts In Mac Pages Or Keynote

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can create organizational charts like this one in Pages and Keynote.

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If you need to create an organizational chart or diagram there's some custom software that you can use. But actually Pages and Keynote do a really good job of this if you just take the time to learn how to use things like shapes, groupings, and connection lines. So this is what we're going to be going for. Each item here in the organizational chart has a picture inside of a circle. Then it has an outer border around the circle. But there's a gap between them. Then there's a box down here, with some curved corners, and in the box is one piece of text with the person's name, and another piece of text with their title. Then I'm connecting these boxes using right angle connection lines. Let's look at how to build all of that. 

First, since I'm using Pages, I'm going to go to File and Convert to Page Layout just to make things easier. You can certainly build this using standard body text if you're creating a book. If you're using Keynote this is a step you don't have to take. The rest of what I'm going should work just as well in Keynote as it does in Pages. So let's start by creating our first shape. I'm just going to choose a circle here. I want to shrink this down a bit so instead of dragging it I want to be really precise. I'm going to go to Arrange and here I can set the size and position. So I want to set this to one inch width and height. I'm going to go and center it here at the top and maybe set it to start one inch down. This is what I want to have as the outline here. 

So I just want to have a border. So I'll go to Style and I'm going to change the border to a line and I'm going to set the color of the line to whatever color I want to use. I'm going to set it to dark blue. I'm going to set it to 3 point. Then I'm going to change the Fill to No Fill. Now I've got this circle.

Now let's add another circle. This is going to be the one that we're going to use for the image. This is also going to be just a circle shape like before. I'm going to set it to be something smaller. So instead of it being one inch I'm going to do point 8 width and height. Let's bring that into the middle of the circle here and see if it works. That looks pretty good. I'm not going to worry about the color of it because I'm going to add an image to it. So I've got some sample images here on the desktop. I'm going to take this image here and I'm just going to drag it into this circle. Now I can scale it down and adjust it till I get what I want. Then hit Done.

So next I want to add the bottom portion here which is going to be another shape. Let's use a rounded rectangle just to get the edges a little bit less than square. I'm going to bring that up here. I'm going to drag it up a little bit like that. I've got this green dot here. I can drag that out so the radius of the square is less. I want to bring it down to something like 3. I'm going to select it and then I'll go to Style. I'll change the color fill to the same as the one from the circle. Now I'm going to add some text. So I'm going to create a text box. I can type into the shape here but I want to have multiple lines and I want to have more control as to the style. So I'm not actually going to use that feature. I'm going to create this text box and I'm going to shrink that down and have it fit inside the shape here. Make it just one line. I'll go to the text formatting here. I'm going to set that to be bold. I can set the font if I want as well. I'm also going to set the text color to be white. Now let's enter some sample text here. I'm going to set it to center alignment like that. So that's looking pretty good. I'm going to Copy that and Paste it really quickly just to make a duplicate of it. But this one is going to be non-bold, maybe only 10 pt and this will be like their title. Like that. Now I can use the arrow key to adjust it a little bit. I'll just bring this down a couple. I think I've got what I need here. Maybe move this down a bit like that. 

So now that I have this I want to reuse it. So there's a couple of things I want to do. The first thing is I want to remember all of these styles. The reason that's important is I want to be able to change styles across my entire organizational chart very easily. So I'm going to select the outer circle here. Go to Style and go to the next page of Styles and click the Plus button and it will save the style there which is basically a border with no fill. I can do the same thing with each of these. So I'm going to go to the picture one here. I'm going to go here and hit Plus and save that as a style. I'm going to go to the box there and save that as a style. Then I'm going to add each one of these text boxes here as a style as well. So now I've got these all added as styles. This means that I can then copy and paste this as many times as I want knowing that I can change the styles and I'll demonstrate that for you.

But first let's select all of this and I'm going to go to Arrange and Group. So that turns this into a single element. Now I can Copy and Paste or hold the Option key down and drag and get a copy. I can do it again and again. So now I've got these two copies here. I can work to get them perfectly aligned. What I can do is I can align this one  underneath it and use Shift and then left arrow. I did it twelve times. So now I know that's perfectly spaced there.

Now I want to change the pictures and names for these. Now the cool thing about groups in Pages and Keynote is you can select it once and it selects the group. But if I double click in here I can select this individual item and actually edit it. So double click in there and now I can select this and change it. The same thing with this one. So it was easy to change those. I can do the same thing with the images here. I can click once and then click again and now I've selected just that image in there without having to break the group up. I can go to Format, Image and there's a Replace button. Click that and select another image there. It'll even use the same cropping. So if I have a bunch of images that are the same size it will work out nicely. Let me do it for this one here. Replace and select. Great. So now I've got these like I want. It's time to add lines. 

You have three types of lines that you could add. You can add them by themselves or you can select the items first. I'm going to select this item and then Shift click to select this one. I'm going to do Insert Line. I can select Straight ConnectionLine, Curved Connection line, or Right Angle Connection Line. For organizational charts straight and right angle work best. I'll try straight here and you can see it connects these two items. I'm going to Undo that and instead use the Right Angle Connection Line because I find those work better for this. Here's what you get. You get a something like this that has two turns in it. This green dot controls where those turns happen. So I can move these around and do something like this. If I select either one of these and move it the connection line stays with it. So let me got and select both of these and move them down a little bit further. Then choose the connection line. Then change the green dot to be around here. You really have to play with where that green dot it. Just try different things. Try moving it all the way around the elements here. You'll eventually find the location of the green dot that works best for what you want. Something like this.

Now the line here I can change that to say 3 pts. Let's also make it the same color. You can also set it to be like dots instead of a straight line. Now once I've got that I'm going to add that as a style here as well using the Plus button. So now let's select this and this. Do Insert and then Line and Right Angle Connection Line. Then we have to do the same thing here. Let's move the dot up there. Now I want to apply the size and color for that. Now remember I set a Style for that. So I can actually click on that style and it applies it instantly.

The beauty of those styles is I can select anything in here. Let's select this group here. Double click and select that circle there. Let's say I wanted to make that a little bit bigger. I can increase that, say, to 5 pt. Now I can go to that style. Remember it was this style here. If I Control click on that style I could say Redefine Style from Selection. Now I could say Yes, Update all the objects that use the current style. Hit OK and notice that it updates those circles as well. I could do the same thing with the connection line. Say I have like twenty connection lines after building this out. I can select one and increase that. Then go to the style that I set for it before. Control click on it. Redefine Style. Update all objects and you can see it updates the other line in this case. So now I end up with an easy way to update things. I could update these boxes here. I can update the text for the styles for the text. Here I've got those styles. There's the bold one. There's the plain text one for the title. If I select this one here, this is an image, and I go to Styles here for image and you can see I've got that style there. So if there's something, like I want to add a border to it I can by simply adding it to one and then Update the style for all.

Now I end up with a cool looking chart like this and I can continue to build it out by adding more of these. Just select a group. Copy, Paste it or Option drag to make a new one. Then change the information in it. Add a new connection line. I can continue to build out this chart. 

So let's look at some other examples. Here's something that's very similar except this is chart that won't actually use connection lines. You can see I'm using a circle there with an outer circle and a gap. I'm putting then a line sharp right there with some text at the top and some text at the bottom. 

Here's one where I'm not using pictures at all but I've got a circle and another shape in here. Notice that this shape is just one from the Shapes here. There are all these different shapes that you could use. There's people here. You can see I'm getting this one from there but there are other people ones here as well. There are also other symbols that could represent things like departments in an organization. Things like that. So all I'm doing here is I'm just putting one shape on top of another and then grouping them together. Then I've created a shape here where I've got a circle with a triangle in it. So you can create shapes pretty easily by using an initial shape, I'll ,for instance, grab a circle and then taking another shape and putting it on top. So I'm going to take this triangle here and I'll make it a different color so I could see it. I can change its size and orientation just by dragging around the corners. Getting to be like that. This one's on top and this one's on the bottom. I'll Shift Select to select them both. Then go to Format, Shapes and Lines. Subtract Shapes. You can see it cuts that hole there in the middle. That's how I made this shape. Then I just copied and pasted it to use throughout. The rest here are just little text boxes like before. I'm using right angle connection lines but I set the line type to have these dots.The square dots work best because they usually run on top of each other. Sometimes not. You can see how this line here doesn't. So I prefer, actually, to use solid lines and avoid that issue if you need to.

Another issue here is I've got a line going underneath this name. The way I've done that is I have the names here as two text boxes. Under them I've got a white shape. Here's another example where I have a picture inside a shape. You can see it's square this time with the square outline. I have a box here and I have two text boxes. I have these all saved as styles so I can change them all easily and change the colors easily. I've done connection lines from this one to each of these three here. 

These are just some quick examples that I came up with and I'm not a designer. I'm sure if you are you can create organizational charts that look way better than this. Really, the sky's the limit. You can add all sorts of different shapes, images, text, and other elements. Copy, paste it, resize them, add different types of connection lines, different colors, and create amazing organizational charts using the software you probably already have on your Mac.