Affinity Diagram for Excel™ provides Microsoft® Excel users with a tool to design, develop and manage an Affinity Diagram within the Microsoft® Excel environment. This will reduce training cost to learn yet another program.

Affinity Diagram for Excel™ is a fully functional program developed using Microsoft® Excel. This product is an integral part of the Microsoft® family of products and will allow you to import and export data, charts, and reports between all Microsoft® products.

An Affinity Diagram (sometimes referred to as a "KJ", after the initials of the person who created this technique, Jiro Kawakita) is a special kind of brainstorming tool. You use an Affinity Diagram to:

q       Gather large amounts of ideas, opinions, or issues and group those items that are naturally related, and

q       Identify, for each grouping, a single concept that ties the group together 

An Affinity Diagram is especially useful when:

q       Chaos exists

q       The team is drowning in a large volume of ideas

q       Breakthrough thinking is required

q       Broad issues or themes must be identified

q       Building an Affinity Diagram is a creative rather than a logical process that encourages true participation because everyone's ideas find their way into the exercise. 

For a given project in the view of project management there are essentially five phases:

              I.      Develop Header, Idea, Comments and Web Link information

           II.      Build the Affinity Diagram

         III.      Re-group Headers, Ideas

        IV.      Re-build the Affinity Diagram

The following steps allow the user to develop a Microsoft® Excel based Affinity Diagram automatically.

1. Select your Header, Ideas, Comments and Web Links data in a MS Excel worksheet
2. Generate a New Affinity Diagram Workbook
3. Review the Headers, Ideas, Comments and Web Links
4. Generate the Affinity Diagram
5. Re-Group the Headers and Ideas
6. Generate a New Affinity Diagram Workbook

Assume the following information has been collected from a brainstorming session.

Select the Headers and Ideas (high-light them in MS Excel) and select option “[1] Create a New Affinity Diagram workbook.

 The created workbook has the following worksheets:

Worksheet	Description
Data	Headers, Ideas, Comments and Web Link worksheet
Diagram	Affinity Diagram generated from “Data” worksheet
Work	Headers, Ideas, Comments and Web Link worksheet generated from the Diagram worksheet
Work-Diagram	Affinity Diagram generated from “Work” worksheet
Setup	All parameters to run the Affinity for Excel™ program

In other words, the generation of final Affinity Diagram can be visualized as:

This will generate the following workbook

Choose the option “[2] Process Headers…” from the Tools à Affinity Diagram menu to generate the Affinity Diagram automatically.