How Do You Make A Pie Chart

How To Make A Pie Chart In Google Sheets

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Graphs and charts give you visual ways to represent data. So, if you want to show parts of a whole, a pie chart is the way to go. You can create and customize a pie chart in Google Sheets easily.

How To Make Your Pie Charts Better

Use colors to make your most important value stand out. For the rest of the value, use shades of one color rainbow colors will distract readers from comparing the pie shares.

Consider labelling smaller pie slices outside of the chart, since pie charts are hard to label. That’s especially necessary when you have long labels.

Consider grouping slices together in one bigger slice to clean up the overall look of the chart. The bigger the slices, the easier they are to read .

Consider placing the pie chart in a margin column or sidebar. Pie charts are not as flexible in width as e.g. bar charts. Meaning, they will have lots of unused white space around them when given the full width of the text.

How To Create A Pie Chart In Excel

To create a pie chart in Excel, first, open your spreadsheet with the Excel app. Well use the following spreadsheet for this guide:

In your spreadsheet, select the data that you want to plot on your pie chart. Do not select the sum of any numbers as you probably dont want to display it on your chart.

While your data is selected, in Excels ribbon at the top, click the Insert tab.

In the Insert tab, from the Charts section, select the Insert Pie or Doughnut Chart option .

Various pie chart options will appear.

To see how a pie chart will look like for your data, hover your cursor over the chart and a preview will appear.

Once you decide on a chart, click that chart to add it to your spreadsheet.

The chart is now available in your spreadsheet. To change the charts header, double-click the header and enter a new name.

You can change the charts position in your spreadsheet by dragging and dropping the chart. Theres an option to lock the position of your chart as well.

And thats how you go about displaying your Excel data using slices on a pie!

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Colors Fonts And Backgrounds

If the default chart appearance or available themes and quick settings dont fit your needs, you can change the appearance of the pie slices by applying different fonts and adding a color or texture to the background.

ColorsTo change the appearance of a pie slice, click on the slice and then double-click it to open the Format Data Point window. Click Fill to change the color, add a texture, or even fill the slices space with a picture.

FontsOnce youve added data labels, you can change the size, color, and other appearance factors. Click the data label once, right-click on it, and click Format Text. The changes made will affect all selected text .

You can also perform the same action on any other text in the pie chart, such as the legend or a title.

BackgroundsIf you dont like the default background, right-click on an empty space in the chart, and then click Format Chart Area. Not only can you change the background color, but you can also add textures, gradients, and patterns. You can also change the thickness and color of the charts border, and add other effects .

How To Make Pie Chart In Excel

Pie Chart is very simple to use. Let us now see how to make Pie charts in Excel with the help of some examples.

Example #1 2D Pie Chart in Excel

Look into the first example here. I have a top ten country population percentage over the world population. The first column contains a country name, and the second column contains the population percentage.

We need to show this in a graphical way. I have chosen a PIE CHART to represent slices of PIE.

Follow the below steps to create your first PIE CHART in Excel.

Step 1: Do not select the data rather, place a cursor outside the data and insert one PIE CHART. Go to the Insert tab and click on a PIE.

Step 2: once you click on a 2-D Pie chart, it will insert the blank chart as shown in the below image.

Step 3: Right-click on the chart and choose Select Data.

Step 4: once you click on Select Data, it will open the below box.

Step 5: Now click on the Add button.

it will open the below box.

In the Series Name, I have selected the heading as a percentage.

In the Series Values, I have selected all the countries percentage values ranging from B2 to B11.

Step 6: Click on OK.

Step 7: Now click on the Edit option.

Step 7: Here, we need to select the values that we need to show horizontally. Horizontally we need to show all the countries names. Countries names are ranging from A2 to A11.

Step 8: Now, finally click on, OK.

Your PIE CHART is ready.

and type your heading.

Step 13: Now, your chart ready to rock.

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Rotating The Pie Chart

To rotate the pie chart , right-click on the chart, click Format Data Series, click Options, and enter a value into the Angle of first slice box. Youll have to experiment to get the chart to look exactly as you envision.

If the goal is to have a particular slice at the top of the chart, its easier to rearrange the order of the rows of data, placing the one you want to appear at the top of the chart in the first row of the data column.

Introduction To Pie Charts In R

Pie Chart in R is one of the basic chart features which are represented in the circular chart symbol. The section of the circle shows the data value proportions. The sections of the pie chart can be labeled with meaningful names. Pie charts are generally preferred for small-size vector variables. Pie charts can be of two-dimensional view or three-dimensional views based upon the R packages. Pie is the function in R language which is supporting two-dimensional pie charts. Pie charts are very useful for data analysis. Pie charts in R can be assigned with a meaning title using main as a parameter in the pie function.

Using the pie charts, patterns in the data can be understood easily, whereas if we go through the numeric figure, often understanding takes a while. For example, if we plot the above example as a pie chart, we can understand the amount of production and proportion of production within a minute.

Hadoop, Data Science, Statistics & others

There are various packages for plotting pie charts in R, and among those many options, we shall focus on two methods in this article.

Syntax

The above section provided a brief idea of the pie chart and its use. In this section, we shall learn about pie charts in R specifically. For those who are new to R, it is a programming language mainly used for data analysis and machine learning. R is quite rich in its functionality and provides hundreds of libraries for various use cases.

Where,

Note:

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Slice Percentages And Chart Legend

We can add slice percentage and a chart legend by creating additional chart variables.

# Create data for the graph.x < -  clabels < -  cpiepercent< - round, 1)# Give the chart file a name.png# Plot the chart.pie))legend, cex = 0.8,   fill = rainbow))# Save the file.dev.off

When we execute the above code, it produces the following result

Pie Chart Pros And Cons

Although Pie charts are used a lot in Excel and PowerPoint, there are some drawbacks about it that you should know.

You should consider using it only when you think it allows you to represent the data in an easy to understand format and adds value for the reader/user/management.

Lets go through the Pros and Cons of using Pie charts in Excel.

Lets start with the good things first.

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How To Make A Pie Chart In Excel In Just 2 Minutes

Written by co-founder Kasper Langmann, Microsoft Office Specialist.

The pie chart is one of the most commonly used charts in Excel. Why?

Because its so useful

Pie charts can show a lot of information in a small amount of space. They primarily show how different values add up to a whole.

That might not sound like much, but well look at how pie charts can be great visual aids.

Kasper Langmann

Lets take a look at why pie charts are so useful, then dive into making them!

*This tutorial is for Excel 2019/Microsoft 365 . Got a different version? No problem, you can still follow the exact same steps.

Additional Pie Chart Formatting Options

There are a variety of ways to customize a pie chart. You can create new categories, sort how the slices appear, and add WordArt.

Resorting By Slice SizeIf you want to position the slices based on size , sort the original data using Excels sorting tool, and the chart will automatically update group the chart slices by size.

Combining Small Slices into an Other CategoryThere are two ways to combine a number of small categories into one other category. To do this easily, enter data into Excel but combine the desired numerical values into a single row and name the categorical value other.

Below is a more complicated method:

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Common Pie Chart Options

Absolute frequency vs. relative frequency

Pie charts can be labeled in terms of absolute values or by proportions. Labeling slices with absolute amounts and implying the proportions with the slice sizes is conventional, but consider the goals of your visualization carefully in order to decide on the best annotation style to use for your plot. In some cases, including both numbers in the annotations can be worth the additional text.

Doughnut plot

A doughnut plot is simply a pie chart with a central circle removed. For the most part, there arenât significant differences in readability between a pie chart and donut chart, so the choice of a doughnut over a standard circle is mostly that of aesthetic. One small boon for the ring shape is that the central area can be used for additional information or to report statistics.

Formatting The Series Options

Again, while the default settings are enough in most cases, there are few things you can do with Series Options formatting that can make your Pie charts better.

To format the series, right-click on any of the slices of the Pie chart and click on Format Data Series.

This will open a pane with all the series formatting options.

The following formatting options are available:

Now let me show you some minor formatting that you can do to make your Pie chart look better and more useful for the reader.

• Highlight one slice in the Pie Chart: To do this, uncheck the Vary colors by slice option. This will make all the slices of the same color . Now you can select one of the slices and give it a different color
• : In case you have a slice that you want to highlight and analyze, you can use the Point Explosion option in the Series option tab. To separate a slice, simply select it and increase the Point Explosion value. It will pull the slice slightly from the rest of the Pie Chart.

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Whats Good About Pie Charts

If youre interested, you can also read this article by Excel charting expert Jon Peltier on why we love pie charts

Compare Two Pie Charts

Create vectors y2010 and y2011, that contain financial data for two years. Then create a cell array containing the labels for the values.

y2010 =  y2011 =  labels =  

Create a 1-by-2 tiled chart layout, and display two pie charts that each have a title. Then display a shared legend in the east tile of the layout. To do this, call the legend function with a return argument to store the legend object. Then move the legend to the east tile by setting the Layout.Tile property to ‘east’.

t = tiledlayout % Create pie chartsax1 = nexttile pietitleax2 = nexttile pietitle% Create legendlgd = legend lgd.Layout.Tile = 'east' 

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How To Make A Pie Chart In Excel

• — By Sumit Bansal

Excel has a variety of in-built charts that can be used to visualize data. And creating these charts in Excel only takes a few clicks.

Among all these Excel chart types, there has been one that has been a subject of a lot of debate over time.

the PIE chart .

Pie charts may not have got as much love as its peers, but it definitely has a place. And if I go by what I see in management meetings or in newspapers/magazines, its probably way ahead of its peers.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a Pie chart in Excel.

But this tutorial is not just about creating the Pie chart. I will also cover the pros & cons of using Pie charts and some advanced variations of it.

Lets start from the basics and understand what is a Pie Chart.

In case you find some sections of this tutorial too basic or not relevant, click on the link in the table of contents and jump to the relevant section.

This Tutorial Covers: