How to Create an Entity Relationship Diagram from Excel (with Quick Steps)

Step 1: Prepare a Database

• Create a database containing three tables in separate worksheets. The tables contain customer information, order details, and product info.

Read More: How to Manage Relationships in Excel

Step 2: Create Entities

• To create the entities, you must create 3 entities for the separate tables.
• Format a few cells with borders to make them look like rectangular boxes. Each represents a particular entity.
• Name the entities “Customer,” “Order,” and “Product.”

Read More: How to Create Data Model Relationships in Excel

Step 3: Add Attributes to the Entities

• You need to add the attributes to each entity based on the database tables. For example, the “Customer Information” table contains “Account_No”, “First_Name”, “Last_Name”, “Email_ID” and “Phone_No”. You need to add these properties as attributes to the entity named “Customer.”
• Do the same for the other entities.
• Add Primary Key and Foreign Key notations at the left of each attribute. For example, write PK for Primary Key at the left of Account_No, as each customer has a unique account number. You can also use FK for Foreign Key.

Read More: How to Create a Relationship Between Tables in Excel

Step 4: Copy Entities as Pictures

• Copy the range of cells for each entity and paste them as pictures one by one.

Step 5: Show Relationships

• Select Insert >> Illustrations >> Shapes >> Line to draw the crow’s feet notations to show the relationships between entities.

Read More: How to Create Relationship in Excel with Duplicate Values

Step 6: Group All Objects

• Select all images and line objects and right-click to group them together.
• Copy or save the diagram as a picture.

Things to Remember

• Be careful while determining the cardinality of relationships between entities.
• You can also create an intermediate entity with a composite key if there are no direct primary foreign key relationships between entities.

Download the Practice Workbook

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