How to use Excel Data Visualizer for flowcharts

A worked example, stage by stage

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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

1. 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.

2. 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".

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

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. Microsoft has published nothing confirming the shutdown ran or reversing it, and its support pages still describe the retirement in the future tense.

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.