Question: I am working on an organizational (hierarchy) chart from SmartArt in Word. I would like to merge two of the boxes into one but keep the two lines above it. However, I am not able to do that in the SmartArt features. Any ideas?
Answer: If you copy and paste the org chart into PowerPoint, you’ll have a few more features in SmartArt. One of those is the ability to convert the SmartArt into shapes. Once you do that, however, you will not be able to add more levels to your org chart through the SmartArt features. So before doing this, I would make a duplicate of that slide in case you need to refer back to the SmartArt and add more levels (or at least finalize the remainder of the org chart first).
On the duplicated slide click on the SmartArt and from the Design tab on the ribbon click to the far right Convert > Convert to Shapes. After converting to shapes you can delete one of the shapes that you wanted to merge and just stretch out the other one and add any additional text you need. Converting to shapes will allow you a little more flexibility in dealing with the individual elements of the chart.