Creating Fishbone Diagrams in Excel 2007

Fishbone, or cause and effect, diagrams are often used in project planning sessions to identify all of the components, both man and machine, that go into any workflow process. Once these components are identified, it’s a lot easier to look at each one and see where problems or inefficiencies are creeping into the process.

While there are some dedicated project management applications that will help in the construction of fishbone diagrams, you can also create these visual aids yourself. Here, we’ll show how to make such a diagram in Excel 2007.

We’ll begin by constructing the main arrow in the middle of the fishbone diagram. Go to the Insert tab on the Excel ribbon and click on Shapes. Click on the first arrow in the Block Arrows category. Or, you can pick any of the other arrow shapes if you prefer. (Click any image for a larger view.)

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Click anywhere in the spreadsheet and the arrow will be placed. Once the arrow has been placed, you can move and resize it to the location and shape you like. Here, we’ll make the arrow longer and place it in the middle of the visible spreadsheet area.

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If you don’t like the default choices of color and style, you can make changes to these on the Format tab, but for now, we’ll keep the default options.

Now, we want to insert the lines that converge into the main arrow. Return to the Insert tab on the Excel ribbon and click on Shapes again. This time select the single-headed arrow (the second item) in the Lines category.

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Click someplace on the spreadsheet to insert the line. Don’t worry too much about the position since we’re going to need to move it anyway after we resize it.

Click and drag one of the endpoints of the line to resize and change the angle of the object. The screenshot below shows this action in process.

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Next, drag the line to the desired position on the spreadsheet.

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If you want to make the line wider, right-click on the object and select Format Shape.

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In the Format Shape dialog box, make sure that Line Style is chosen from the list on the left and modify the value for Width.

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Click the Close button when done to return to the Excel spreadsheet. Here’s what our diagram looks like so far.

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