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: Affinity Diagram (Done manually) An example of organizing customer requirements in an affinity diagram for a new digital camera is shown below. From www.npd-solutions.com/affinitydiagram.html 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. Select your Header, Ideas, Comments and Web Links data in a MS Excel worksheet Generate a New Affinity Diagram Workbook Review the Headers, Ideas, Comments and Web Links Generate the Affinity Diagram Re-Group the Headers and Ideas 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.