How to use Excel Data Visualizer for flowcharts
The Visio Data Visualizer add-in for Excel was announced for retirement in November 2025, with a shutdown set for 2 March 2026. What happens to the diagram in your workbook, and how to get a flowchart from the same table.
The add-in that turned an Excel table into a flowchart was the Visio Data Visualizer add-in, announced for retirement in November 2025 with a service shutdown date of 2 March 2026, and Excel itself has no native feature that does the same job.
The short version
- Microsoft announced the add-in's retirement in November 2025 and set the service shutdown for 2 March 2026; it has published nothing since confirming or reversing it.
- Embedded diagrams stop loading and stop refreshing, but Microsoft says "the data in the Excel tables will remain intact".
- Excel has no native feature that turns a table into a flowchart: SmartArt and drawn Shapes are typed or drawn by hand, with no binding to cells.
- Microsoft's recommended replacement is the Data Visualizer templates in the Visio desktop app, documented as Visio Plan 2 only.
- Consumers had one documented rescue, "Show as Saved Image"; only work or school accounts could turn a diagram into a real Visio file.
Excel never had this feature: the add-in did
If you have been going through the Insert tab looking for the Visio Data Visualizer add-in, you are not doing anything wrong and it is not hidden somewhere clever. Microsoft announced the retirement of the Visio Data Visualizer add-in for Excel in November 2025 and set the service shutdown for 2 March 2026, a date it confirmed in December 2025 was unchanged. Older add-in support pages still describe the retirement in the future tense despite the elapsed shutdown date. Its marketing pages, meanwhile, still tell you to use the add-in to create flowcharts inside Excel, with no retirement notice on them at all, which is a good part of why you are here rather than reading a banner.
The add-in was appealing for one specific reason, and naming it matters because it decides what you should replace it with. You did not need a Visio subscription to create a diagram in Excel. Microsoft's own words were that you could "view, print, or share your diagrams with others for free in the web version of Visio", and that "for additional editing capabilities, you need either a Visio Plan 1 or Visio Plan 2 subscription," with editing in the Visio desktop app requiring Plan 2. Creating a diagram and refreshing it from the latest data were available on all three tiers. It rendered through a cloud service, which is exactly why switching that service off breaks diagrams that are already sitting in saved workbooks: the drawing was never really in the file.
If you have such a workbook open in front of you, the important part is that your data is fine. Microsoft's statement is that the diagrams "will no longer load" and "the data connection and refresh capabilities will no longer work", but that "the data in the Excel tables will remain intact". Two rescue paths are documented, and both need the service to still be answering, so try them before you conclude anything. On a Microsoft 365 work or school account, the ellipses in the diagram area offer "Open in web": sign in, and a Visio file is created that stays accessible from OneDrive and Visio for the web. Consumers without Microsoft 365 are offered one thing: the drop-down arrow at the top right of the add-in window, then "Show as Saved Image", then right-click and Copy. Microsoft documents no .vsdx route for them at all.
Microsoft's recommended replacement is, verbatim, "exploring Visio Plan 2 and the ability to create a Data Visualizer diagram via the Visio desktop app". That is a genuinely surviving route: the Data Visualizer templates and the Create Diagram from Data wizard are not retired, and they still read an Excel table with a next-step column. But it moves the work out of Excel, onto Windows, and onto a tier whose list price at the time of writing is US$15 per user per month paid yearly, which is a different proposition from an add-in on the Insert tab that cost nothing to draw with. /guides/how-to-use-visio-data-visualizer separates the two things sharing the name. The procedure below is the surviving route, starting from the workbook you already have.
The same table, drawn from its own columns
A customer feedback process held as rows, revealing one column at a time: the same columns the Visio wizard asks you to map.
A table of steps and nothing else
"Send feedback through any channel", "Log the feedback in the tracker", "Categorise the item and set severity" and a question, "Does the customer need an individual reply?". Shapes are set, but no step points anywhere yet, so this is the workbook most people already have: a list that cannot tell you what follows what.
The next-step column
Filling in the row number each step leads to produces the arrows, including the shape of the triage: "Is the cause inside our own process?" and "Does it recur or breach a service target?" both fork. Two of those exits point forward at a row that has not been written yet: a dangling reference, which is what a Next Step ID naming an ID no row carries does in the Visio wizard.
Labels on the branches
"Inside our process", "Outside our control", "One-off, low impact": until each exit is labelled, a reader cannot tell which route a case takes. This stage also adds the loop: "Did the change fix the problem?" sends "No, still recurring" back to "Agree the action, the owner and the check" rather than to a dead end.
Owners and phases
The last two columns place every step in a lane (Customer, Support, Process owner, Quality) and in a phase from Capture through to Close, which is what the Visio wizard's function and phase mapping does for a cross-functional flowchart. The handoffs were in the table all along; they simply had nowhere to appear.
How it works
Rescue anything already embedded in the workbook
Do this before touching anything else, because it is the only step that depends on the service still answering. On a Microsoft 365 work or school account, select the ellipses in the diagram area, choose "Open in web" and sign in: a Visio file is created and stays accessible from OneDrive and Visio for the web. Without a work or school account, the add-in window's top-right drop-down arrow offers "Show as Saved Image", then right-click and Copy: Microsoft documents no .vsdx route for consumer accounts. If the diagram no longer loads at all, skip to the next step and rebuild from the table, which is intact.
Reshape the table into the columns the Visio wizard reads
Microsoft's supplied schema is: Process Step ID, where "each value in the Excel table must be unique and not be blank"; Process Step Description, the "text added to each shape in the flowchart"; Next Step ID, "the Process Step ID of the next shape in the sequence"; Connector Label, where "for branching shapes, connector labels are represented as text separated by a comma"; and Shape Type. The function and phase columns apply only to a cross-functional flowchart and are ignored by a basic one. Format the range as an Excel Table: Microsoft's guidance is to "use an Excel table and not a custom range if you want to keep your diagram and data synchronized".
Open a Data Visualizer template in the Visio desktop app
This part happens in Visio, not in Excel, and Microsoft documents it as Visio Plan 2 only: "the ability to use the Data Visualizer templates is only available with Visio Plan 2". Open Visio, or select File > New if you are already editing a diagram, select TEMPLATES, then select Flowchart. Three Data Visualizer templates are offered: "Basic Flowchart - Data Visualizer", "Cross-Functional Flowchart - Data Visualizer" and "Audit Diagram - Data Visualizer". Pick the one that matches what you are drawing. If you would rather start from Microsoft's own workbook than reshape yours, select "Excel data template" from the template preview first.
Choose a unit of measurement and run the wizard
From the template preview, choose a unit of measurement and select "Create", which launches the Create Diagram from Data wizard. It has five pages: Excel, Functions/Phases, Process Steps, Shape Types and Connections. The Excel page asks "what diagram do you want to create from data?", then to "select the Excel workbook" and to "select a table or a custom range in the workbook". Process Steps requires a Process Step ID or Activity ID and takes the description; Shape Types maps your Shape Type column; Connections carries the Delimiter and Connector Label settings. Functions/Phases is where the swimlane and timeline mappings live. Select "Finish" to draw the diagram.
Refresh the diagram when the table changes
In Visio, click in the diagram container to enable the Data Tools Design tab in the ribbon, then select Refresh Diagram. Refresh is scoped to the container ("refreshing only makes changes to the shapes and connections inside the container"), and your styling survives it, because "any formatting changes you make to the shapes or connectors inside the container are preserved". If a refresh would discard changes, a "Refresh Diagram Conflict" dialog appears and asks you to decide. This is the direction most people want, and it is the half of the sync that behaves the way you would expect.
Write diagram edits back to Excel, with one warning
Data Visualizer is genuinely two-way: Update Source Data, on the same Data Tools Design tab, pushes changes from the diagram back into the workbook. Two conditions apply. The workbook must be saved and closed if it lives on a desktop machine or a network file server, and an "Update Source Data Conflict" dialog appears when data may be lost, where you select "Overwrite". The warning is worth reading twice: "do not use formulas in the Excel data source. After you select Overwrite in the Update Source Data dialog box, Visio converts the formula to the formula result." A calculated column does not come back.
Mistakes to avoid
Hunting for the add-in under Insert > Get Add-ins
It is a reasonable place to look, and if it is not there you will get no explanation from Microsoft as to when it left. Removal of the add-in from the Excel add-in store, its templates and the ribbon was first set for 8 December 2025, then "extended until at least January 2026" with an "exact revised date" promised in a future update, and that follow-up was never published, so no Microsoft page names a removal date at all. Meanwhile the marketing pages still advertise it. Rather than searching, go to the desktop route, or to something that needs no add-in.
Assuming the data went with the diagram
It did not, and restoring an older copy of the workbook or retyping the steps is wasted work. Microsoft is explicit that "the data in the Excel tables will remain intact"; what stops working is the rendering and the refresh. Your Process Step ID, Next Step ID and Connector Label columns are still the diagram: they only need something to draw them.
Following Microsoft's own sample-workbook links
The two starter workbooks the live add-in articles still link, at aka.ms/visio-dv-bf for the basic flowchart and aka.ms/visio-dv-cff for the cross-functional one, both now redirect to bing.com, which is what aka.ms returns for an unmapped short link. Verified live on 30 July 2026. Get the starter workbook from inside Visio instead, by selecting "Excel data template" on the Data Visualizer template preview.
Waiting for Copilot to fill the gap
Copilot in Excel's documented visual output is charts and PivotTables, along with highlighting, sorting and filtering; Microsoft's Copilot-in-Excel pages do not mention flowcharts, process diagrams, SmartArt or Visio output. That is an absence in the documentation, not a statement that it cannot be done, but planning around a capability Microsoft has not documented is how a process map stays undrawn for a quarter. There is also no announced Copilot diagramming feature in Visio itself.
Draw this process from its rows
Open /templates/spreadsheet-to-flowchart as your own chart to see the columns filled in, then paste your own table over them.
Related guides
Drawing quantities instead of steps?
Excel's chart types do not include a Sankey diagram at the time of writing. If your data is flows with amounts, you can paste it into QueryChart and draw one.
Frequently asked questions
Where has the Visio Data Visualizer add-in gone in Excel?
Microsoft announced its retirement on 3 November 2025, revised the notice on 9 December 2025, and told tenant admins the same thing in Message Center post MC1182535. The service shutdown was set for 2 March 2026, and Microsoft reaffirmed in December 2025 that the date was unchanged. Removal from the Excel add-in store, its templates and the ribbon was first set for 8 December 2025, then "extended until at least January 2026" with a revised date promised that never appeared. Older add-in support pages still describe the retirement in the future tense despite the elapsed shutdown date.
Can Excel turn a table into a flowchart without Visio?
Not on its own. Excel's only diagramming primitives are SmartArt and drawing Shapes, and both are typed or drawn by hand: Microsoft's instructions for them describe no binding to cells, so nothing regenerates when a row changes and moving a step means redrawing it. Copilot in Excel's documented visual output is charts and PivotTables, and Microsoft's Copilot pages never mention flowcharts or diagrams. So the honest answer to "how do I do this in Excel now" is that you do it somewhere else: either the Visio desktop wizard, or a tool that treats the rows as the diagram. /guides/how-to-turn-excel-data-into-visio-flowchart covers the source table in detail.
Will I lose my process data now that the diagram will not load?
No. Microsoft's statement covers exactly this: the diagrams "will no longer load" and "the data connection and refresh capabilities will no longer work", but "the data in the Excel tables will remain intact". What you lose is the picture and the live connection, not the process. Everything that defined the flow (the step IDs, the descriptions, the next-step column and the branch labels) is still in the sheet, in the shape a Visio wizard or another generator can read. Do not roll back to an older copy of the workbook; open the table and check the columns instead.
Do I need Visio Plan 2 to get an Excel-driven flowchart back?
For Microsoft's own route, yes: both the Data Visualizer templates and the Create Diagram from Data wizard are documented as "only available with Visio Plan 2", whose list price at the time of writing is US$15 per user per month paid yearly, and Plan 2 is the only subscription tier that includes the Windows desktop app; there is no Visio desktop app for macOS. If that is more licence than the job needs, the free replacement linked below rebuilds a diagram from a pasted table with no account, and /guides/visio-data-visualizer-alternatives compares the options properly, including where a team needs review and approval on the result rather than just a picture.
