Review: Human Concepts Orgplus 6 charting software

Ask most people to produce a chart showing their company or departmental structure and they’ll reach for Powerpoint or something similar.

An alternative, however, is Orgplus 6 from Human Concepts, which makes charting easier and adds a raft of extra functionality including data import, flexible publishing and automation options.

Orgplus is an easy-to-install Windows desktop application. There’s nothing out of the ordinary when it comes to the core drawing facilities; as you might expect it’s totally geared to building hierarchical charts, with the usual palette of tools to draw and link boxes, add labels, set backgrounds and so on.

Photos and graphics can be added and there’s a bundle of customisable templates that make it easy to produce very professional-looking documents.

With the Professional version we tested, you can import and match data for use in charts from a variety of sources; everything from flat .csv files through Excel spreadsheets to SQL databases and even SAP systems.

You can also perform spreadsheet-like calculations on the data, choose how to display it and create and link to sub-charts and so on, to create phone lists, salary tables and other useful documents.

Charts can be printed and exported to Microsoft Word or Powerpoint and published as either HTML documents or pdfs.

They can be distributed with the free Orgplus reader provided, or users can be given the Orgplus web plug-in to access charts via a browser.

There are also facilities to configure scheduled updates to chart data and publish charts automatically.

It can take a while to get to grips with some of the more advanced tools in Orgplus, but no special skills are required and it will find a place in any small business producing charts on a regular basis.

System requirements
Pentium class CPU
Windows 98SE, NT 4 (with SP3 or above), 2000, XP, Server 2003
64MB of Ram for Windows 98, 128MB for all others
80MB of free disk space
16bit graphics with 1,024 x 768 resolution 

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