How to create a flowchart from Excel in Visio

The short version

• The surviving route is inside Visio: File > New, Select TEMPLATES, Select Flowchart, "Basic Flowchart - Data Visualizer".
• Both the Data Visualizer templates and the Create Diagram from Data wizard are Visio Plan 2 only: US$15 per user/month list, paid yearly, at the time of writing.
• Plan 2 is the only subscription tier that includes the desktop app, and Microsoft publishes no Visio desktop app for macOS.
• Microsoft announced the retirement of the separate Excel add-in in November 2025 with a 2 March 2026 shutdown; the desktop templates carry no retirement notice.
• Microsoft's two sample-workbook short links, aka.ms/visio-dv-bf and aka.ms/visio-dv-cff, both redirect to a search page: use "Excel data template" in the preview instead (checked 30 July 2026).

The route that survives runs through Visio, not through Excel

The instruction most readers arrive here holding is to install an add-in into Excel and work from the Insert tab. That is not the route described below, and it is not the route Microsoft now points at. This one begins in Visio on Windows and never asks Excel to do the drawing: open Visio or select File > New, Select TEMPLATES, Select Flowchart, and choose "Basic Flowchart - Data Visualizer". From the template preview you take Microsoft's starter workbook via "Excel data template", fill in your steps, pick a unit of measurement, select Create, and Visio walks you through a five-page wizard that reads the table and draws the whole diagram: shapes, branches and connectors.

The confusion is Microsoft's own. It 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. Microsoft’s notice says the service would shut down on that date; some older support pages still describe the retirement in the future tense. Meanwhile Microsoft's marketing pages continue to advertise the add-in as a current feature, which is why so many readers arrive convinced they have missed a ribbon button. The separate desktop Data Visualizer templates remain documented by Microsoft.

State the licence before you spend an afternoon on this. Microsoft's words: "The ability to use the Data Visualizer templates is only available with Visio Plan 2", and the same sentence is published about the Create Diagram from Data wizard. Plan 2 is US$15 per user per month paid yearly at the time of writing, list price, and it is the only subscription tier that includes the Visio desktop app; Plan 1, at a US$5 list price on the same date, is web and Teams only. There is no Visio desktop app for macOS, and data-connected diagrams cannot be edited in Visio for the web at all. So this is a Windows, Plan 2 procedure, with no partial version.

What you are really producing is a spreadsheet: one row per step, an ID column, a next-step column, a branch-label column, a shape column, and for a cross-functional diagram the function and phase columns. The worked example below builds exactly that table for a travel request and approval process and shows the diagram appearing one column at a time, because the columns are the part that decides whether this works. /guides/how-to-turn-excel-data-into-visio-flowchart covers the source table in detail; /guides/how-to-use-visio-data-visualizer covers what Data Visualizer is and which half of it is which.

The table Visio reads, built one column at a time

A travel request and approval process assembled the way the wizard consumes it: descriptions, then next-step numbers, then branch labels, then functions and phases.

1. Descriptions and shape types

   Rows 1 and 2 ("Raise a travel request with dates and purpose" and "Estimate the total trip cost") carry a description and a shape type and nothing else. This is Microsoft's starter workbook once the steps are typed in but before anything says what follows what, and at this point Visio would draw two orphaned boxes.

2. The next-step column draws the arrows

   Filling in the next-step number for each row is what produces connectors, and row 3, "Trip within the travel policy?", immediately forks to two different rows. A decision with only one exit is the commonest fault in a source table and it stays invisible until the connectors exist.

3. Label every branch

   The exits now say which case they carry: "In policy" and "Out of policy" off the policy check, and three labelled routes off "Finance approves the escalated cost?", one of which points back to row 2 to be re-costed at a lower fare. Visio calls these connector labels and expects them comma-separated in one cell, in the same order as the next-step IDs.

4. Functions and phases place the steps

   The last two columns turn the flat flowchart into a swimlane diagram: "Employee", "Line manager", "Travel desk" and "Finance" become the functions, and "Request" through "Expenses" the phases. In Visio this is the whole difference between the Basic Flowchart template, which ignores those columns, and the Cross-Functional Flowchart one, which uses them.

How it works

1. Check you are on Visio Plan 2, on Windows

   Microsoft states plainly that the Data Visualizer templates and the Create Diagram from Data wizard are available only with Visio Plan 2, whose list price at the time of writing is US$15 per user per month paid yearly and which is the only subscription tier that includes the desktop app. Plan 1 and the bundled Visio in Microsoft 365 cannot run this, there is no desktop app for macOS, and data-connected diagrams cannot be edited in Visio for the web. Establish this first.

2. Open the Data Visualizer template

   Open Visio, or select File > New if you are already editing a diagram. Select TEMPLATES, then Select Flowchart. Three Data Visualizer templates are listed: "Basic Flowchart - Data Visualizer", "Cross-Functional Flowchart - Data Visualizer" and "Audit Diagram - Data Visualizer". Choose the basic one for a plain flow; choose the cross-functional one if your table has owner and phase columns you want rendered as swimlanes.

3. Take Microsoft's starter workbook

   From the template preview, select "Excel data template" to get the starter workbook with the columns already named. Do not go hunting for the sample files Microsoft's older documentation links: aka.ms/visio-dv-bf and aka.ms/visio-dv-cff are both unmapped short links now and redirect to a search page, verified 30 July 2026. The workbook in the preview is the one to use.

4. Fill in the workbook as an Excel Table

   Each row is a step. Process Step ID must be unique and never blank; Process Step Description is the text that lands in the shape; Next Step ID names the following step; Connector Label carries branch text, comma-separated for branching shapes; Shape Type names the Visio shape. Format the range as an Excel Table rather than leaving it a custom range (Microsoft's guidance is to use a table if you want the diagram and data to stay synchronised) and keep formulas out of it entirely.

5. Run the Create Diagram from Data wizard

   Back in the preview, choose a unit of measurement and select Create, which launches the wizard. It has five pages: Excel, where you answer what diagram you want and select the workbook and the table or custom range; Functions/Phases, where the function or swimlane mapping is required and phase or timeline optional; Process Steps, where Process Step ID and description are mapped; Shape Types; and Connections, with its Delimiter and Connector Label settings. Then select Finish and Visio draws the diagram.

6. Keep the diagram and the workbook in step

   Click inside the diagram container to reveal the Data Tools Design tab. Refresh Diagram pulls Excel changes into the diagram, preserving formatting you applied to shapes inside the container and raising a "Refresh Diagram Conflict" dialog if a refresh would discard edits. Update Source Data pushes diagram changes back to the workbook, which must be saved and closed if it lives on a PC or file server, and offers Overwrite in an "Update Source Data Conflict" dialog. /guides/how-to-update-visio-flowchart-from-excel covers both directions.

Mistakes to avoid

• Looking for the add-in inside Excel

  Microsoft announced the retirement of the Visio Data Visualizer add-in for Excel in November 2025 with a service shutdown set for 2 March 2026, confirmed unchanged that December, and has published nothing since about whether it executed. Its own marketing pages still advertise the add-in with no retirement notice, so readers reasonably conclude they are missing a button. Go through Visio desktop instead; that path has never carried a retirement notice.

• Chasing the dead sample workbooks

  Microsoft's live documentation still links two sample files, "Basic Flowchart Process Map" at aka.ms/visio-dv-bf and "Cross-Functional Flowchart Process Map" at aka.ms/visio-dv-cff. Both short links are now unmapped and redirect to a search page (checked 30 July 2026). Take the workbook offered by "Excel data template" in the template preview and stop searching.

• Annotating the generated diagram outside its container

  The wizard puts the flow inside a container, and that boundary is the sync boundary: "Refreshing only makes changes to the shapes and connections inside the container." So a caption, a legend or an extra note dropped on the page beside the diagram is not maintained by anything and will not be pulled back into the workbook either. Formatting applied to the shapes and connectors that are inside the container is preserved across a refresh, which is where the effort belongs. Two things you can lose by getting the source wrong instead (a custom range, and formulas) are set out at /guides/how-to-turn-excel-data-into-visio-flowchart.

• Expecting to finish the job in a browser

  Microsoft lists diagrams connected to Excel, Access, SharePoint lists, SQL Server and other OLEDB or ODBC sources as unsupported for editing in Visio for the web, and publishes no Visio desktop app for macOS. Creating and refreshing a Data Visualizer diagram is a Windows desktop activity. Colleagues can view and comment on the result in a browser without a licence, but they cannot touch the data connection.

Open the travel request as a live chart

Open the travel request example as your own chart to see the same columns filled in, then paste your own rows over them.

Open the travel request as a live chart

Related guides

• Import Excel data into Visio: link rows to shapes
• How to update a Visio flowchart from Excel
• Visio Data Visualizer add-in retired: what to use instead

Frequently asked questions

Is the Visio Data Visualizer add-in for Excel still available?

Treat it as gone and do not build on it. Microsoft announced its retirement on the Microsoft 365 Blog in November 2025 and set the service shutdown for 2 March 2026, a date it reaffirmed in December 2025 as unchanged. It has published nothing since confirming the shutdown ran or reversing it, and the two support articles still carry a future-tense banner. Because the add-in rendered diagrams through an online service, once that service stops, diagrams embedded in workbooks no longer load and refresh no longer works, though Microsoft says the data in the Excel tables remains intact. Microsoft's own recommended replacement is Visio Plan 2 and the desktop Data Visualizer route described above.

Which Visio licence do I need to create a flowchart from Excel?

Visio Plan 2. Microsoft's wording is unambiguous ("The ability to use the Data Visualizer templates is only available with Visio Plan 2") and the same restriction is published for the Create Diagram from Data wizard. Plan 2 lists at US$15 per user per month paid yearly at the time of writing and is the only subscription tier that includes the Visio desktop app, installable on up to five PCs. Plan 1, at a US$5 list price on the same date, is web and Teams only. The bundled Visio in Microsoft 365 is a lightweight web app capped to basic diagram types and Microsoft says it is not a replacement for either plan. Whether the perpetual Standard or Professional 2024 licences include the templates is not something Microsoft's documentation settles.

What does the Excel table have to look like?

One row per step, formatted as an Excel Table. Microsoft's supplied template names the columns: Process Step ID, which must be unique and never blank; Process Step Description, the text added to each shape; Next Step ID, the ID of the next shape in the sequence; Connector Label, where branch text is separated by commas for branching shapes; Shape Type, the Visio shape to use; and the function and phase columns, which apply only to a cross-functional flowchart and are ignored by a basic one. /guides/how-to-turn-excel-data-into-visio-flowchart works through the column design, including how to handle a decision with three exits and what makes an ID stable.

Can I create a flowchart from a spreadsheet without Visio Plan 2?

Not in Excel itself. Excel's only diagramming primitives are SmartArt and drawn shapes, and Microsoft's instructions for both describe typing or pasting content by hand: nothing binds a SmartArt node to a cell, so moving a step means redrawing it. Microsoft's Copilot in Excel documentation lists charts and PivotTables as its visual output and does not mention flowcharts or process diagrams. If the Plan 2 licence or the Windows requirement is the blocker, QueryChart is a browser tool whose editor is the table: one row per box, a column holding the row number each step leads to, and lane columns for the owner and phase. Editing the rows is editing the diagram, on any operating system, with no add-in and no round trip to lose formulas in.