Sankey Diagrams

The Visio Guy had another cool Sankey diagram on his blog last week. Credits go to Chris Webb of Woodland Trust, who created this using the line thickness option rather than pre-wired shapes.

The diagram has a left-to-right orientation and shows the different sources of money received by the trust. The types of funds (e.g. grants, legacies, direct marketing) are grouped together by colors. Flows have percentile values, rather than absolute ones. I am not sure what the boxes labeled “Sys” are, but the colors change. All flows merge into the box “Finance” which has a subgroup “Sales Ledger”.

The flow bands between most of the nodes have a nice soft curving. This is why some people do refer to Sankey diagrams as spaghetti diagrams.

If you are using Visio, you can download this diagram and look how it has been done. Nice work! I hope to see more of these Sankey diagrams done in Visio….

Visio Guy has been “messing around with … Sankey Diagram Shapes for Visio again — because [he] just couldn’t resist”.

The result is a pre-wired Sankey diagram shape, in which five flows exit from a process box. The flows scale automatically according to the user input.

VG’s example is fun, showing cost of living and what money is being spent on. I just hope his food spendings don’t spread 60/40 on chips and coffee…

Read the full blog post. There is a download link for this Visio shape at the end.

Chris Roth, the Visio Guy in his latest article focuses on the question whether and how Sankey diagrams can be drawn in Microsoft Visio.

Can Visio do Sankey? While there are no Sankey Diagrams templates that ship with Visio, there are a few in-the-box shapes that can be used to create rudimentary Sankeys.

He identifies some problems with the Visio-supplied arrow shapes, and provides “a new version of the arrow shape which is more suitable to making Sankey diagram” for download. Really cool, Visio Guy!

In one of the follow-up comments Chris states that pre-built shapes can only cater for the most basic Sankey arrows, but “a proper, full-blown solution would utilize at least some code, if nothing else, for decent data-input dialogs, etc.”