Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Jon Stuckey

Jon Stuckey — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:29 GMT

I have to agree with Gordon on his comment that using Excel by itself is a great way to display a sitemap. My collegues and I have evolved from doing sitemaps years ago in Powerpoint (using the org chart feature), to Visio, to Excel. The biggest advantage as Gordon points out is that Excel is portable, virtually everyone can open, print, and edit an Excel file. Why create in Visio if you have to convert to PDF before you can send it to your customers? Most of my customers do not have Visio.

I find that Excel gives me the flexibility that I need to create detailed sitemaps using basic Excel features (color, font sizes, adjusting column width, row height, hiding grid lines, shading, lines, boxes, etc.). When I’m finished with the sitemap, you’d be hard pressed to tell that it was done in Excel.

My collegues and I agree that this is the easiest way to create AND maintain sitemaps. For example, when you need to add a new item, you can simply add a row and/or cut and paste as required.

Multiple worksheets allow you to have sitemaps for different audiences if you need to convey different experiences for different user groups (think customer, administrator, etc.).

I’d be happy to post an example of an Excel sitemap if someone can tell me how to attach a file to this site. I searched but couldn’t find how to do it.

Cheers!

Jon Stuckey — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:31 GMT

Hi everyone… for those of you who have requested the Excel template that we use, I’ve sent it to your individual email addresses. I apologize for the delay, it’s been a busy week, but you don’t care about that.

I’ve submitted a request to the IA Institute, so hopefully they’ll post to their site soon. I’ll post back here to let you know if/when it gets published.

Jon Stuckey — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:34 GMT

A quick update on the Excel template. I emailed Noreen a couple of days ago with the file to post to IAinstitute.org. I just checked this morning and it appears that it has not been posted yet.

In the mean time, I forwarded the template to those of you who have provided your email addresses. I think I got everyone, but if not, please let me know. I’ll post back here once it gets posted to IAinstitute.org.

Jon Stuckey — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:44 GMT

First, a great big thank you to Noreen for posting the Excel file to iainstitute.org!

Second, for all of you who have requested a copy of the Excel spreadsheet, please accept my apologies for not getting back to you individually. It has been an absolutely crazy month at work and I didn’t take the time to email everyone individually in hopes that the file would soon be posted. Now that you have it, I hope it was worth the wait.

Enjoy!

Also a huge thanks to Stephen for getting this important discussion started.