Word 2007 Smart Arts - how deep can I go?

Question

In Office Word 2007, I want to use a Smart Art to create a hierarchical diagram for an organization. I want to use the one called "simple radial" (at least that's my word-to-word translation from German - it's the one with the circle in the middle and other circles around it, attached by lines). However, it seems to only support one level of depth (at least for circles). Everything else just becomes a bulleted list inside of the circle.

Is there any way to accomplish this in Word 2007? Else: are there any other free tools to do this? I also want to add some other shapes.

Again: I want to accomplish a star-like structure with a total of 4 depth levels.

Thanks for your responses in advance!

Answer 1

Does what you want to do look like this?:

If so, you can do this by the following steps:

1. Create Smart Art graphs as much as you need.
2. Select the whole Smart Art graph, right click and set Text Wrapping as Tight. Do this for every single graph one by one. Now you can move the Smart Art graphs freely.
3. Insert circles and lines as much as you need from Insert > Illustrations > Shapes and format them as you like.
4. Combine all shapes and graphs as you like. When you're finished, you can group them for better congruity.

Using this method, you can make use of Smart Arts more flexibly. If you are looking for more, you can use other drawing tools like MS Visio, Dia, OpenOffice Draw, SmartDraw etc.