Create Flow Charts with Coggle

A flow-chart, or process diagram, is a way of illustrating the steps necessary to complete a task.

Tip: This guide is for using Coggle in the brower on desktop, on mobile devices long-press to open the context menu or add items instead of right-clicking.

Some of the shapes used in this example are included in our paid plans. The rectangle, oval and pointed-rectangle shapes are all included in our free plan.

Creating a Flow Chart in Coggle

1. Create a New Diagram

Choose 'Create Diagram' from your documents list page at https://coggle.it

2. Give the flow chart a title

Click on the title item, and enter "Customer Support Proces", or your own title for the flow-chart that you're creating.

3. Create the top-level items in your flow-chart.

Right click on the background of the diagram, and choose the (+) icon to create new items. In our Customer Support Process example we have three top-level items, which will be the inputs to our process. These are an Email, Tweet, or Facebook message:

Tip: in Coggle, the title of the diagram is always the first item in the diagram. You could build your flow chart from the first title item, but then the diagram's title would have to be the same as the text in that item, so creating a new item gives you more control.

4. Choose the style of items.

Right click on each item, then choose the colour or shape menu to choose its shape or style. It is customary to use the rectangle with rounded ends for the "input" or start items in a flowchart:

5. Create the next steps in the flow

Use the (+) buttons on items to create connected items, then give them labels:

6. Join items together

To join items together, for example to join the "Email" and "Facebook" items into the "Is the query account related?" item, use the (+) buttons to create new empty items connected to the Email and Facebook items, and then drag the empty item (which will display 'click to edit') until it is over the item to connect with:

7. Creating 'in-line' items on branches

We want the 'yes' and 'no' items to be simple labels on the branches, rather than items in themselves. To do this, choose the option in the shape menu:

8. Add and connect more items

Continue to add and connect items until your flow chart is complete! Change the shapes and colours of items to indicate their meaning or importance to you (red is a great colour for very important steps!)

Tips:

to change the colour of just one item, hold the [shift] button when selecting the colour.
If you find the arrow on a connection is giong in the wrong direction, right click on the connection, and choose the 'reverse connection' option.

View or create your own copy of the complete diagram from this example here: https://coggle.it/diagram/W3iq_EjpB17JPXIf/t/customer-support-process