Improvement Insights Blog
Use Excel for Flowcharts and Value Stream Maps Not Visio
Did you know you can draw fishbone diagrams, flowcharts, value stream maps and more without Visio? You can do all that and more right within Excel, and those can be viewed by others who don’t have Visio. Here’s how:
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“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“I was at the Colorado Lean Network Conference and I was demoing how you can do Value Stream Maps and other things right in Microsoft Excel. The guy looking at it said, “I… I don’t have to use Vizio anymore?” I said, “No! There’s a little mini-Vizio built right into Microsoft Excel.”
“You can draw flowcharts and all kinds of things right in Microsoft Excel. It doesn’t have to be a spreadsheet, it could be a diagram or whatever you want. And we have those templates, Fishbones, Value Stream Maps and flowcharts and all kinds of junk in the software, [like] driver diagrams for healthcare. This can all be done in Microsoft Excel.
“So that’s my Improvement Insight for this week. Use Excel to be Vizio for a lot of the things that you do, and then you can share it more easily with everyone. They don’t have to have Vizio readers or anything. That’s my Improvement Insight. Let’s go out and improve something this week, like how we do diagrams.”
