Org Chart Templates: Five Layouts and When Each One Fits

You searched “org chart template” and got a gallery of 50 designs with gradient boxes. The design is the easy part. The layout decides whether your chart still makes sense when you add the 40th person, and almost no template gallery tells you which layout fits which company.

So here are five layouts, what each is good at, and the company shape that breaks each one. Every layout below is shown inline as plain text, so you can sketch your own before opening Word, Google Sheets or anything else.

If you haven’t drawn a chart before, start with the step-by-step guide to making an org chart. This post is about picking the shape.

Start with your data, not the template

Every org chart template is a rendering of one list: name, title, reports to. Get that list right in a spreadsheet first, one person per row, and you can switch layouts in minutes. Start from a pretty template instead, and you’ll retype names every time you change your mind.

The Excel org chart guide shows that list format in detail. Two edge cases to settle before you choose a layout: people with two managers, and contractors. Both change which template works.

1. The top-down hierarchy

              CEO
     ┌─────────┼─────────┐
   VP Ops   VP Sales   VP Eng
   ┌──┴──┐     │      ┌──┴──┐
  Ops1  Ops2  AE1    Eng1  Eng2

This is the chart everyone pictures. It’s the default org chart layout in SmartArt, which Microsoft Support’s guide to SmartArt org charts places under Insert, then SmartArt, then Hierarchy. Google Sheets draws the same shape from two columns, per Google’s Docs Editors Help on organizational charts.

Fits: companies with clear layers and managers who each have a handful of reports.

Breaks: when one manager has a long row of reports. The chart gets wider than the page and you start shrinking the text until nobody can read it. SmartArt lets you change a branch’s “hanging layout” so reports stack vertically under their manager. Use it before you shrink a single font.

2. The wide chart for teams with big spans

                 Head of Support
 ┌────┬────┬────┬────┬────┬────┬────┬────┬────┬────┐
 A1   A2   A3   A4   A5   A6   A7   A8   A9   A10  A11

Manager spans are getting bigger, which makes this layout more common than templates assume. Gallup’s span of control research found the average number of people reporting to a US manager rose from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025. Gallup also reports 22% of managers have 10 to 24 direct reports, and 13% oversee 25 or more.

A row of 25 boxes won’t fit any page. Draw the wide team as a vertical list under its manager instead:

Head of Support
 ├─ A1
 ├─ A2
 ├─ A3
 └─ … A25

Fits: support, operations, retail, and founder-led startups where everyone reports to one person.

Breaks: nothing structurally, but it hides sub-teams. If 25 people actually work in three shifts, show the shifts as groups even if they share a manager.

3. Department columns

 SALES          │ OPERATIONS     │ ENGINEERING
 VP Sales       │ VP Ops         │ VP Eng
  ├─ AE1        │  ├─ Ops1       │  ├─ Eng1
  └─ AE2        │  └─ Ops2       │  └─ Eng2

Same reporting lines as layout 1, but each department gets its own column or color block. Readers find their own team first, then look sideways.

Fits: 30 to a few hundred people, where the question people ask is “who’s in finance?” more often than “who does the CEO manage?”

Breaks: when teams cross departments. A designer who sits with engineering but reports to marketing ends up in the wrong column, whichever one you pick. That’s when you need layout 4.

4. Dotted-line (matrix) reporting

   VP Marketing        VP Product
        │                  ┊
        └── Designer ┄┄┄┄┄┄┘
     solid = manager   dotted = day-to-day lead

A solid line shows who manages someone. A dotted line shows who directs their daily work. This is the only org chart template here that most tools won’t draw for you. In SmartArt you’ll draw dashed connectors by hand, and the Google Sheets chart only reads one manager per person.

Fits: project-based teams, agencies, and any company where people answer to a functional manager and a project lead.

Breaks: when more than a handful of people have dotted lines. Ten dashed connectors crossing a page is noise. At that point, list the second reporting line on each person’s profile instead of drawing it.

Add a two-line legend every time. Without it, half your readers will assume the dashed line is a printing error.

5. Photo cards

 ┌──────────────┐
 │   [photo]    │
 │  Dana Ortiz  │
 │  VP Ops      │
 │  Chicago     │
 └──────────────┘

Each box becomes a small card with a face, name, title and location. SmartArt includes picture layouts for this, covered in the same Microsoft SmartArt guide.

Fits: remote and hybrid teams, fast-growing companies, and anyone onboarding new hires who’ve never met their colleagues. The guide to org charts with photos explains why faces help people remember who’s who.

Breaks: maintenance. Cards take up more space, so the chart fits fewer people per page, and every new hire means hunting down a photo. Missing photos make the chart look abandoned faster than any other gap.

Which org chart template fits your company

Pick the layout for the question people ask most:

You can mix them. A department-column chart with photo cards and one hanging branch for support is a perfectly good chart. What you can’t mix is two versions of the truth, so keep the name, title and manager list as the one source and regenerate the drawing from it. The employee directory template covers which other fields belong on that list.

Whichever template you choose, a drawn chart starts going stale the day someone changes teams. If that keeps happening, compare approaches on our org chart software page, where our own org chart app is listed as coming soon.

FAQ

What is the most common org chart template?

The top-down hierarchy: one person at the top, each manager’s reports in a row beneath them. It’s the default org chart layout in Microsoft’s SmartArt and the shape Google Sheets draws from a name column and a manager column.

Does Microsoft Office have an org chart template?

Yes. In Word, PowerPoint and Excel, go to Insert, then SmartArt, then Hierarchy, and pick an organization chart layout. There are picture layouts too if you want a photo in each box. The PowerPoint org chart guide walks through it click by click.

How do you show dotted-line reporting on an org chart?

Draw the main reporting line as a solid connector and the secondary one as a dashed line, then add a short legend so readers know which is which. Templates rarely do this for you, so expect to draw the dashed lines by hand.

Which org chart template works best for a small company?

Under about 15 people, a wide chart with everyone in one or two rows beneath the founder is usually clearest. Add department groupings once you have two or more managers, because that’s when people start asking who owns what.

How many people fit on one org chart page?

It depends on the layout, not a fixed number. A top-down chart gets too wide once one manager has more than eight or so reports in a row, so switch that branch to a vertical, hanging list or split the chart into one page per department.

An org chart you don’t redraw

Templates are fine until the third reorg. We’re building the alternative: InstaCheckin People, our employee directory and org chart app, is coming soon.

A browsable org chart where you move up to a manager or down to direct reports is coming soon. So are profiles that show each person’s manager, direct reports and assistants, with employees adding their own photo. Sync with Google Workspace and Microsoft Entra ID is coming soon too, so when someone changes teams in your identity system, the chart follows.

People is coming soon, so see how it fits against other employee directory software, then join the waitlist and we’ll email you when it opens.