I just realized I have another question: What does Word afford in the context of drawing org charts? “Anyone with Word can update it” is obviously one. But are there any others?

The first thing I tried was to read about D3 and tried to modify their example code to see what I could come up with. And then I realized something Very Important: Org charts are not trees. I should have known better. I had drawn org charts before and had already found out back then that org charts are not trees (okay, maybe for “normal” businesses they are… but a lot of nonprofits don’t have “normal” structures, so any alleged normality is only illusory). So all tree-based layouts are out. Back to square one…

I got the file yesterday but I just started looking at it. A few problems stood out right away:

1. I can’t read the names; they are too small. Even in Preview I have to zoom in twice for the names to even become legible.
2. I actually don’t understand the relationships. The way they drew the “members” box makes it look like committees aren’t composed of members. (And are staff members?) And the arrows are confusing. They jump over boxes without indicating they’re jumping over things, and boxes in their way appear to be sometimes also connected to the arrows.

And of course a few thoughts jumped out right at once too (yes, even before the problems, actually):

1. Do I need to do it in a file format they can update? Does this mean I have to do it in Word? (No…)-:
2. The org chart on the site is the same as the Word file I was given, only that what’s on the web is a pixel dump of the real thing. Does that mean I should do it as a web app of sorts?
3. Would D3 be of any use?

How should I even start thinking about this?