Anything you type shows up within the flowchart shape, as shown in Figure 6, below.įigure 6: Text within your flowchart shape With your Terminator shape still selected, start typing some text.Drag and draw on your slide, document, or worksheet to place an instance of the Terminator shape, as shown in Figure 5, below.įigure 5: Place a Terminator shape to start your flowchart Your cursor will turn into a crosshair.Now, select the Terminator shape within the Shapes gallery (see Figure 4).Note: Want to know more about all the flowchart shapes? Look at our Flowchart Symbols: What They Represent? page. Hover your cursor over any of these shapes to see a tool tip that provides you with the name/description of the hovered shape (see Figure 3, below).įigure 3: Flowchart shapes are described within the tool tips you see There are 28 flowcharting shapes available here. First, let us explore the Flowchart category. Let us now explore various shapes available within these categories.These are the Flowchart and Lines categories, highlighted in red and blue respectively within Figure 2, above. To create flowcharts, only two of these categories matter to you. Within the Shapes gallery, you will find plenty of shapes that are arranged in various categories.Doing so will bring up the Shapes drop-down gallery that you see in Figure 2, below. In PowerPoint, Word, or Excel-access the Insert tab of the Ribbon, and click the Shapes button.Excel users can similarly use an available, blank range of cells in their worksheet. If you are using Word, just substitute the blank slide area with a blank area on your document. Let's start with a blank, new slide that contains a slide title and nothing else, as shown in Figure 1, below.Excel's large screen real estate within each worksheet does make it a great home for detailed or complicated flowcharts.

PowerPoint has similar slide constraints like Word's page constraints, but for larger flowcharts, you can use PowerPoint's hyperlinking options that let you spread the same flowchart over multiple slides.

Word is great for simple flowcharts with few shapes as long as they all fit within the page constraints of Word.

Alternatively, here are some thoughts that will help you decide which of these three programs work best for your flowcharts: If you already need to create a flowchart in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, then the choice has already been made for you.

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