What program is best to design flow charts.

In particular I have been tasked to reorganize the company's entire maintenance program from start of the process (user) to the maintenance division and back to the user. After 30 or so hours on it, we are almost done with this diagram on a grease board.

What program should I be using to put it in a flow chart in order to write up the SOP?

I used to use Excel for this stuff, but the new Office 2010 seems rather clunky and all they have are the templates now (or I can't find a wizard to help me).

Any suggestions? TIA

I use MS Visio for that.

It appears that Visio is the right choice for this task (as it is a monster of a flowchart with multiple dependent charts attached - safety, training, event management etc)

Thanks!

Visio is the best MSFT option. If you have access to a printer that can go bigger than legal it's nice to be able to make big flow charts as well.

Do some googling and you can find a lot of good stencils for this task. The stock flowchartting stencils aren't bad in Visio, but you only get certain ones based on the version you have.

Take a few minutes and mess with connectors as well. It will save you a lot of frustration if you learn to anchor them properly to shapes when you inevitably need to reorganize the layout of the chart on the page.

Since Visio is no longer part of the MS Office suite, your next best choice (within MS Office) is power point.

dam

I wonder does MSFT look at the functions of programs (IE flow charts in old Excel) and then remove those functions to create a whole new product? How soon does MS Solver become its own program (currently a function in Excel)?

I have access to a plotter so the printing function isn't an issue.

NM

[This message has been edited by Say Chowdah (edited 4/10/2012 9:41p).]