Create SmartArt Diagrams in Excel

SmartArt diagrams help bring your data to life, similarly to how an effective chart can take cells and cells of data and turn them into a picture that clarifies what would otherwise be boring or unfathomable data.

Rather than being built from your worksheet data, however, SmartArt diagrams are designed by you, using pre-set groups of shapes and lines, and you add the text to complete the picture.

As shown here, we're letting people know how the data they're looking at – population and housing cost data for several US cities – was obtained, vetted for accuracy, and shared with the government and the public.

Let's build it together.

First, after choosing SmartArt from the Illustrations menu on the Insert tab, I see the Choose a SmartArt Graphic dialog box, presenting all the different pre-set diagrams that you can make. You can scroll through them All, or choose different categories to preview - such as List, Process, Cycle, and Hierarchy. As you view the diagrams, you can click on them to see their individual names and how they're best used. In other words, what story they tell.

I'm choosing a Process diagram, and specifically, the Step Down Process diagram as was used in the sample diagram.

The diagram's layout appears after I click OK, and I can move and resize it to give myself room to work. This particular diagram layout includes boxes for a single word or short phrase, each accompanied by a bullet point.

You can also Add a Shape if you need more boxes than the diagram gave you. And, it adds a new one, along with the arrow pointing from the prior step down to this new one.

As you'll see as I type in the boxes and then add them to the bullet list, you can have more than that one starter bullet point. Each of my boxes has two bullet points paired with it. That is, until I get to the box I added using the Add Shape button. To get the bullets to appear there, I need to first display the Text Pane, and then Demote the text that appears when I press the Enter key - indicating that I don't want yet another blue box, but bullets for the one I already had.

I can type the bullets for the fourth box, and my diagram is complete - except for any formatting I want to do, which could include changing the type of diagram, if I so desire.

Using the SmartArt Design ribbon, I can change to a more colorful diagram, and then use the various design presets to pick a new look for the diagram, and a shiny 3-D look is applied.

After that, I can fill in the diagram's background so I can't see the worksheet grid through it, using the Shape Fill button on the Format ribbon. I apply a white background, and then switch to a gradient, available from the same button.

As I said, you can change to a different diagram at this point. Each one of the diagrams is previewed one at a time, and as your diagram's text is retained, you can see if your information fits into each new preview. Stopping on a design that allows for boxes with accompanying bullets - and even arrows between the boxes - my diagram is instantly redesigned.

Finally, just like a chart needs a title, so does my diagram. So, using the Shapes tool, I draw a rectangle and type a title in it, and then format the rectangle's text using the Font and Alignment formatting tools on the Home tab, and from the Shape Format ribbon, I use the Shape Effects button, with the intention of making the rectangle look a bit more like the boxes in my diagram.