There's no point denying it, at first glance, creating an organisational chart doesn't seem to be the greatest of graphical challenges.

Draw one box at the top for the managing director, a row one level down for the other directors, and then just paste everyone else into their relative departments. It's all so straightforward... isn't it?

Of course, when you're tasked with creating a chart and it has hundreds of boxes rather than five or six, and you need to share it with others, and maintain it over time with the minimum of hassle, then you realise this isn't such an easy task after all.

Satisfying all these extra real-life requirements has so far earned OrgPlus over half a million customers, but does that mean version 7 is worthy of your cash? We decided to take a closer look.

Even those who've never used OrgPlus before will immediately feel at home, as the interface bears an uncanny resemblance to Office XP.

There's an Office-like task pane on the right-hand side, where clicking 'Create a new chart' leads you to an appealing selection of templates. Each has the same pattern of 11 boxes, but with different box styles, colours and backgrounds. Several appealed to us, but if you're not keen on what's provided you can always choose the Blank option and start from scratch.

Drawing tools are fairly standard and very easy to use. Want five boxes below the current top level, for instance? There's no laborious click, draw, add lines and repeat here: just click the 'Add Subordinate' button five times, then click the top-level box and OrgPlus will add them for you.

Click in a box and start typing to enter a name, then press [Tab] to enter a title, [Tab] again to move to the next box, and you can have a basic chart completed in about a minute. But why stop at basic when there's so much more you can do?

Chart customisations

After playing around with the chart for a while you may decide you're not keen on the template you chose initially. But that's fine - OrgPlus makes it easy to apply another whenever you like.

It's also just as straightforward to change the box colour and style for selected parts of your chart on any of the templates provided (or to customise individual boxes for yourself).