This is the right instinct, and we'll say it plainly: automating an org chart from a simple employee-manager table is exactly the kind of problem that should be solved inside the tool you already use. Moving data out of Excel into PowerPoint or Visio every time a team changes isn't just tedious, it creates a maintenance burden that guarantees your charts will be outdated before you finish formatting them. The approach here, write the hierarchy once, let the automation handle the layout, is the only sensible way to keep up with real organizations.
What this experiment reveals is less about org charts and more about a mindset. The user treated Excel as an engine, not a canvas. Instead of asking "how do I draw a box and connect it to another box," they asked "how do I encode the relationship so the tool can draw it for me." That shift from manual placement to structural logic is the same principle that makes modern data tools powerful. It means you stop fighting the tool and start defining the rules. For anyone who builds reports, dashboards, or team structures regularly, that is a more productive question to ask.
The practical takeaway here is straightforward. If you maintain an org chart manually, you are paying a tax every time someone transfers, promotes, or leaves. That tax adds up fast. The solution is to store the hierarchy as data, just two columns, employee and manager, and let Excel (or any spreadsheet with basic formula or scripting capability) render the visual. It does not require a fancy add-in or a new platform. It requires the discipline to separate the structure from the presentation. That is a skill worth developing, because it applies to far more than org charts. Inventory trees, reporting lines, project dependencies, any nested relationship benefits from this same treatment.
We would suggest one refinement to the experiment. Instead of generating the chart from scratch each time, consider building a small template that updates automatically when you refresh the data. That way, the chart is always live, and you never have to rebuild the layout. The user asked how others would approach this problem. Our answer: treat the hierarchy as your source of truth, automate the layout, and never open Visio for an org chart again. That is a concrete change you can implement this week.