How to use Visio Data Visualizer
Data Visualizer names two different things: a retired Excel add-in and a live set of Visio desktop templates. Which one you have decides the licence, the platform and the whole procedure: here is each, exactly.
Use the Data Visualizer templates inside the Visio desktop app on Visio Plan 2, the separate Data Visualizer add-in for Excel had its retirement announced in November 2025, with the service shutdown set for 2 March 2026.
The short version
- "Data Visualizer" names two products: a retired Excel add-in and a live set of Visio desktop templates.
- Microsoft announced the add-in's retirement in November 2025 and set the service shutdown for 2 March 2026; older add-in support articles still use future-tense wording.
- The three desktop templates (Basic Flowchart, Cross-Functional Flowchart and Audit Diagram) carry no retirement notice and require Visio Plan 2.
- You start inside Visio's Flowchart template category, not inside Excel, and the Create Diagram from Data wizard has five pages.
- Sync is two-way: Refresh Diagram and Update Source Data, both on the Data Tools Design tab, which appears only when the diagram container is selected.
One name, two products, and that is the whole confusion
Two different products have shared the name Data Visualizer, and almost every answer you will find online conflates them. One was the Visio Data Visualizer add-in for Excel: it lived inside a workbook, needed no Visio subscription to create a diagram, and rendered through a Microsoft cloud service. Microsoft announced its retirement on the Microsoft 365 Blog on 3 November 2025 (a post last revised on 9 December 2025) and to tenant administrators as Message Center post MC1182535. The other is a set of Data Visualizer templates inside the Visio desktop app, which carries no retirement notice at all and is the thing Microsoft now points people towards. Which of the two you mean decides the licence, the platform, and whether the procedure below works.
For the Excel add-in the documented timetable is worth stating precisely, because it is messier than the headlines. Microsoft set the service shutdown for 2 March 2026 and reaffirmed on 8 December 2025 that "the service shutdown date of March 2, 2026 remains unchanged". After that date diagrams embedded in Excel "will no longer load" and "the data connection and refresh capabilities will no longer work", although "the data in the Excel tables will remain intact". Removal of the add-in from the store, its templates and the ribbon was first set for 8 December 2025, then extended "until at least January 2026" with an exact date promised in a future update. That update was never published, while older add-in support articles still describe the retirement in the future tense.
The desktop half is alive, gated and genuinely capable. Visio's Flowchart category holds three of these templates ("Basic Flowchart - Data Visualizer", "Cross-Functional Flowchart - Data Visualizer" and "Audit Diagram - Data Visualizer"), and none of the three Microsoft Support pages documenting them mentions retirement. They require Visio Plan 2 (US$15 per user per month, paid yearly, list price at the time of writing), which is also the only subscription tier that includes the desktop app, and there is no Visio desktop app for macOS. Microsoft's own advice to stranded add-in users is exactly this route: "we recommend exploring Visio Plan 2 and the ability to create a Data Visualizer diagram via the Visio desktop app". The cross-functional diagram it produces is covered at /guides/visio-data-visualizer-flowchart.
So the Excel-authored workflow survives (through Visio desktop rather than through Excel), and the reader who cannot find the add-in is not imagining things. Microsoft's marketing pages still advertise it as current: the "Visio in Microsoft 365" page still says to use the add-in to create flowcharts in Excel, with no retirement notice anywhere on it. Meanwhile the two sample workbooks its live support articles still link, at aka.ms/visio-dv-bf and aka.ms/visio-dv-cff, now redirect to Bing, which is what an unmapped aka.ms link returns. If what you actually wanted was for the diagram to follow the table, the example below shows that idea without a wizard: a travel request process in QueryChart where the rows are the chart. The source table's columns are covered in detail at /guides/how-to-turn-excel-data-into-visio-flowchart, and the two quite different Excel-refresh mechanisms at /guides/how-to-update-visio-flowchart-from-excel.
The same idea, one column at a time
A travel request and approval process built the way Data Visualizer builds one (from a table) with the columns filled in stage by stage.
Descriptions only
"Raise a travel request with dates and purpose" and "Estimate the total trip cost" are just labels so far. This is Data Visualizer's Process Step Description column and nothing else: two steps, no order, no shapes.
Shapes and next-step numbers
The row number is the identity, exactly as Process Step ID is in Microsoft's workbook, and the next-step column is what draws the arrows. "Trip within the travel policy?" now renders as a diamond with two exits instead of a rectangle.
Branch labels and the loops
Labelled exits are what make a branching chart readable: Data Visualizer's Connector Label column, comma-separated. "Finance approves the escalated cost?" has three, in this order: Approved, then "Cheaper option only", which sends the trip back to be re-costed, then Refused.
Phases and owners
The last two columns are the equivalent of the function and phase columns in Microsoft's workbook: Employee, Line manager, Travel desk and Finance across Request, Approval, Booking, Trip and Expenses. Same rows, two more columns, and the flowchart becomes a cross-functional one.
How it works
Establish which Data Visualizer you are dealing with
If the entry point you remember was a button in Excel, that is the retired add-in. If you want the version Microsoft still documents, you need the Visio desktop app, which among the subscriptions ships only with Visio Plan 2; Plan 1 is web and Teams only, and Microsoft states plainly that the Data Visualizer templates and the Create Diagram from Data wizard are "only available with Visio Plan 2". There is no Visio desktop app for macOS, so a Mac is not a starting point for this.
Open one of the three Data Visualizer templates
Microsoft's steps: open Visio, or select File > New if you are already editing a diagram, select TEMPLATES, then select Flowchart. In that category pick "Basic Flowchart - Data Visualizer", "Cross-Functional Flowchart - Data Visualizer" or "Audit Diagram - Data Visualizer". Choose the cross-functional one if the process crosses teams and you want swimlanes; the basic one ignores the function and phase columns entirely.
Take Microsoft's Excel data template
From the template preview, select "Excel data template" to download the starter workbook, choose a unit of measurement, then select "Create". Creating launches the Create Diagram from Data wizard. Starting from Microsoft's workbook rather than your own sheet is worth the two minutes: it arrives with the column set the wizard expects, so the mapping page is confirmation rather than guesswork.
Type the process into the workbook's columns
The columns are Process Step ID, which must be unique and never blank; Process Step Description, the text on each shape; Next Step ID, the ID of the next shape in the sequence; Connector Label, where branching shapes carry their labels as comma-separated text; Shape Type; and the function and phase columns, which apply to a cross-functional flowchart and are ignored by a basic one. The wizard accepts a table or a custom range, but Microsoft's guidance is to use an Excel table "if you want to keep your diagram and data synchronized".
Work through the wizard's five pages
The pages are Excel, Functions/Phases, Process Steps, Shape Types and Connections. On the first you select the workbook and then a table or custom range in it. Functions/Phases maps "Function or Swimlane", which is required, and "Phase or Timeline". Process Steps maps the required "Process Step ID / Activity ID" plus the description and an Accessibility section; Shape Types maps shapes; Connections carries "Delimiter" and "Connector Label". Select Finish and Visio draws the shapes and the connectors.
Refresh in either direction, and keep the container selected
Click in the diagram container to enable the Data Tools Design tab, then select Refresh Diagram to pull changes from Excel, or Update Source Data to write diagram changes back. Refreshing only changes shapes and connections inside the container and preserves your formatting; a "Refresh Diagram Conflict" dialog appears when a refresh would discard changes, and an "Update Source Data Conflict" dialog when writing back might lose data, where you select "Overwrite". If the workbook lives on a desktop machine or a network file server it must be saved and closed first.
Mistakes to avoid
Concluding the whole feature is gone
The retirement notice names the Excel add-in and only the Excel add-in. The three Data Visualizer templates in the Visio desktop app, and the Create Diagram from Data wizard behind them, carry no retirement notice on any of the Microsoft Support pages documenting them, and Microsoft's own replacement advice is to use them. "Data Visualizer has been discontinued" is half a story, and the half that is wrong.
Concluding it still works in Excel, because Microsoft says it does
Microsoft's marketing pages have never been updated. The main Visio page still offers to "Convert Excel process map data into Visio diagrams from within Excel using Data Visualizer", and the Visio in Microsoft 365 page still recommends the add-in, neither with a retirement notice. Trust the Microsoft 365 Blog post and MC1182535 over the product pages, and treat the sample-workbook links in the support articles as broken, because they are.
Expecting to do any of this in Visio for the web
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. You can view a data-connected diagram in the browser and you can draw an ordinary flowchart there, but Data Visualizer creation and refresh are desktop capabilities in practice, which, with Plan 1 being web and Teams only, is what makes Plan 2 the real requirement rather than a preference.
Formulas in the source workbook
Microsoft is explicit: do not use formulas in the Excel data source, because after you select Overwrite in the Update Source Data dialog Visio converts each formula to its result. A cost column computed from a rate and a quantity comes back as a frozen number, and nothing warns you. Keep calculations in a separate sheet the wizard does not read, and point the mapping at plain values.
Build the same diagram from a table
Open the travel request example as your own chart to see the columns Data Visualizer asks for, then replace the rows with your own process.
Related guides
Frequently asked questions
Is Visio Data Visualizer being retired?
The Excel add-in is. Microsoft announced its retirement on the Microsoft 365 Blog on 3 November 2025, last revised 9 December 2025, and to tenant admins as MC1182535, with the service shutdown set 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. The Data Visualizer templates in the Visio desktop app are a different feature and carry no retirement notice at all.
Do I need Visio Plan 2 to use Data Visualizer?
For the desktop templates, yes. Microsoft states that the ability to use the Data Visualizer templates, and the Create Diagram from Data wizard, is "only available with Visio Plan 2": US$15 per user per month paid yearly, list price at the time of writing, and the only subscription tier that includes the desktop app. The retired Excel add-in was different: creating a diagram needed no Visio subscription, basic editing in Visio for the web needed Plan 1, and editing in the desktop app needed Plan 2. Whether the perpetual 2024 editions include the templates is not something Microsoft's documentation settles.
How do I get a diagram out of the Excel add-in before it stops working?
Microsoft documented two rescue paths, and they are not equivalent. On a Microsoft 365 work or school account, select the ellipses (…) in the diagram area, then "Open in web" and sign in: a Visio file is created and stays accessible from OneDrive and Visio for the web. Consumers without Microsoft 365 get the add-in window's top-right drop-down arrow, then "Show as Saved Image", then right-click and Copy: a picture, with no .vsdx route offered at all. If your diagram only exists inside a workbook, an image may be all you can salvage; /guides/excel-data-visualizer-flowchart walks that rescue and what to do with the table afterwards.
What can I use instead of the Data Visualizer add-in?
Microsoft's own recommendation is Visio Plan 2 and the desktop templates, and if you already run Windows and want Visio's stencil ecosystem, BPMN 2.0 validation or offline work, that is a reasonable answer. If you want the free, no-signup replacement for what the add-in did, ProcessMapping.app's Data Visualizer alternative is linked below and does exactly that. Visio files stored in OneDrive or SharePoint use file version history; retention depends on the account and library settings. Check those settings and any separate approval workflow before relying on them for controlled documents.
