Diagram templates: 15 free templates you can edit online

A flowchart shows a process as a sequence of steps, with a diamond wherever the process branches on a decision. This template has three rows of steps to fill in, decision diamonds, ovals, notes beside the steps, and brackets that sum up the outcomes of a branch. Use it to document how a process runs today, or to design a new one before you build it. More on how flowcharts work. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth presented the first “flow process charts” to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1921; the shapes used today were standardized in ISO 5807 in 1985.

For a process that ends where it starts: plan, do, check, act; a product’s life cycle; a study routine you repeat every week. Four steps sit on a clockwise loop around the name of the cycle. If your cycle has more stages, start from the 5-step or 6-step cycle instead. The plan-do-check-act loop goes back to Walter Shewhart’s quality-control cycle of 1939, which W. Edwards Deming took to Japanese industry in the 1950s.

A vertical line with five dates, alternating left and right, two events on each date and two highlights on each event. Use it for project milestones, a company’s history or a history lesson, and add dates as the story grows. To start from a blank one, choose Timeline in the Create menu of your dashboard. Read more about timeline diagrams. Joseph Priestley’s A Chart of Biography (1765), which drew about 2,000 lives as lines along a scale of years, was one of the first timelines of this kind.

Seven columns, from New tasks through Assigned, In progress, On hold, For review and Testing to Done. Write each task on a card and move it one column to the right as the work advances, so the whole team sees at a glance what is waiting, what is stuck and what is finished. More on how to use a Kanban board. The method comes from Toyota, where kanban cards have signaled since the 1950s that a station needs more parts (Toyota Production System); David J. Anderson adapted it for software teams in Kanban (2010).

A shop’s refund rule, filled into the flowchart’s shapes. The request starts the process, one decision checks when the order was placed, and both answers end in an email to the customer, so no request goes unanswered. The rule fits in one diamond because it asks one question with two answers; a second condition, such as the state of the item, would be a second diamond.

Two overlapping circles, each with five fields, and the overlap for what both share. Students use it to compare two characters, two countries or two periods; teams use it to compare two tools or two offers before they choose. More on what a Venn diagram shows. John Venn introduced the diagram in 1880, in “On the diagrammatic and mechanical representation of propositions and reasonings”.

Three groups, a field for each overlap of two, and a yellow center for what all three have in common. It suits questions with three sides: three products, three candidates, three historical figures. See 10 Venn diagram examples for ideas. Venn already drew three circles in that 1880 paper. Three is the most that circles can show with every overlap, which is why he switched to ellipses for four.

Two columns under a T-shaped divider, six fields in each. Give the columns opposite headings, such as pros and cons, facts and opinions, or before and after, and fill them in one row at a time. More on using T-charts. Benjamin Franklin described the method in a letter to Joseph Priestley in 1772: reasons for on one side, reasons against on the other, and items of equal weight struck out on both.

A team choosing a hybrid policy lists what each way of working gives it. The overlap holds what the team keeps whichever it chooses (the same goals, the same tools, the weekly meeting), and each side shows what it would give up. The decision then comes down to the six items outside the overlap.

The question sits on the left and branches into two options, each into the possibilities it opens, and every path ends in an outcome. One branch has a chance event, for what you cannot control. Write a probability or a cost on each branch and compare the outcomes at the end. More on how decision trees work, with examples. Decision trees became a standard tool for business decisions with Howard Raiffa’s Decision Analysis (1968), which drew decisions as squares and chance events as circles.

Sorts a to-do list into four groups: quick wins (low effort, high impact), major projects (high effort, high impact), fill-ins (low effort, low impact) and tasks not worth it (high effort, low impact). Do the quick wins first, plan the major projects, and drop or delegate the rest. It is a 2×2 prioritization grid, the same shape as the urgent-important matrix Stephen Covey made popular in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989).

Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in four circles around the subject, with three items in each and room for the evidence behind them. Fill in the strengths and weaknesses from inside the organization, the opportunities and threats from outside it, then turn them into a plan with the strategy from SWOT analysis template. SWOT took shape in the 1960s in the business policy course at Harvard Business School, set out in Business Policy: Text and Cases (Learned, Christensen, Andrews and Guth, 1965).

The question is the first node, and each option is a branch. Outdoors depends on the weather, a chance event the team can’t control, so its branches carry probabilities: 70% sun, 30% rain. Indoors has a known cost, an €800 hall. With almost one chance in three of losing the party, the hall is the safer choice, and the tree makes that trade-off visible to everyone.

Also called an Ishikawa or cause-and-effect diagram. The problem goes at the head, and the bones hold the 6M categories of causes: machine, method, measurement, milieu (the environment), manpower and materials, with three causes on each. Brainstorm causes under every category, then pick the likeliest ones to test. Fishbone is also a layout in the Create menu. More fishbone diagram templates. Kaoru Ishikawa drew the first one in 1943, to show engineers at the Kawasaki steel works how many factors lay behind a quality problem; it became one of the seven basic tools of quality.

The consultant’s way to break a big question into smaller ones. The example asks “Should we expand into APAC?” and splits it into four questions, each with a hypothesis, the evidence needed to test it, and a task with an owner and a priority. A note checks that the branches do not overlap and together cover the whole question. Replace the example with your own question and keep the structure. The note’s no-overlap, full-coverage test is the MECE rule (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive), which Barbara Minto taught at McKinsey and set out in The Pyramid Principle.

A delivery team’s fishbone, with one cause on each of the six bones. Every cause on it can be checked against data: the vans’ service log, the planned routes, the tracking records. The team tests those first, before it settles on the cause the loudest voice in the room suggested.

Four departments under the company, each with its head and three employees. Rename the departments, add or remove people, and put each role’s responsibilities in a note on its box. To start from a blank chart, choose Organigram in the Create menu. See 5 organizational chart examples. The oldest known org chart was drawn up in 1855 for the New York and Erie Railroad by its superintendent, Daniel McCallum; the Library of Congress holds a copy.

Four generations drawn on a tree: you at the trunk, then your parents, four grandparents and eight great-grandparents in the branches. Add photos, dates and stories to each person. For a plainer layout that grows further back, use the genealogy chart template. Families have been drawn as trees for centuries: medieval artists painted the Tree of Jesse, the ancestry of Christ, growing out of the sleeping Jesse.

A bakery with nine people: the owner at the top, three teams below, and the roles in each team under it. A new employee sees at once who to ask about an order. The chart also shows a risk: deliveries rest on a single driver, so the dashed box is the next hire.

A central topic, five concepts, a label waiting on every arrow and one cross-link between two branches. Write the question the map should answer in the center, then give each arrow a short verb such as “causes” or “includes”. The concept map templates page has six more, for biology, the water cycle, a research project and more. Joseph Novak and his team at Cornell University developed concept maps in 1972, to follow how children’s understanding of science changed (Novak and Cañas, IHMC).

Six concepts and a verb on every arrow. Read along the arrows and each link is a sentence: the sun heats the oceans, the oceans release water vapor, water vapor forms clouds, clouds produce rain, rain fills rivers, and rivers flow into the oceans, which closes the cycle.