Continuing the series of Excel tips when building a Cause Map during a root cause analysis, we will focus on aligning and distributing boxes. Last week I reviewed the process for selecting multiple boxes all at once, which will be used for the tip that I cover today, so it may be helpful to review Part 3 before continuing.
If you are building a Cause Map directly into Excel, then your focus as the facilitator should be on getting the information captured in the boxes and showing the cause-and-effect relationships with the connectors, not necessarily on getting all of the boxes to align perfectly. Once you have several causes captured, you can easily go back and align them in a straight line using a function on the drawing toolbar.
Align and Distribute Function – Where to Find
The align and distribute functions are located on the drawing toolbar under the “Draw” menu, then under the menu titled “Align or Distribute” (figure 1). To make the functions more accessible, I prefer to pull the functions away from the drop down menu and place them as a toolbar next to the drawing toolbar. To drag the menu away as its own toolbar, hold your cursor over the top of menu (figure 1). You should see pop up text that says “Drag to make this menu float.” Click and pull the menu of functions away and then release. You can then drag the functions as a toolbar next to the drawing toolbar.
Align and Distribute Function – How to Use
Once you have access to the functions, to use them, you simply select all of the objects that you want to line up. Next, click on the appropriate align function that you need. For example, to line up the boxes in figure 2, I first highlight the boxes using the white select object arrow (see Part 3 for selecting multiple objects).
In this case I would want to use align top, middle or bottom. Note that it is important to keep the sizes of the boxes the same in order for the functions to work as intended. After clicking on the ”Align Top” icon, the boxes are aligned with the highest box (figure 3).
If I now want to distribute the boxes so that there is equal spacing between them, with the boxes still highlight/selected, I would then click on the “Distribute horizontally” icon up in the toolbar (figure 4).
These tips will help prepare your root cause analysis for presentation.
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