How To Make A Pie Chart With Percentages

Explode A Chart Pie Or Pull Out Individual Slices

To emphasize individual values in your Excel pie chart, you can “explode” it, i.e. move all the slices away from the center of the pie. Or, you can add emphasis to individual slices by pulling them out from the rest of the pie graph.

Exploded pie charts in Excel can be displayed in 2-D and 3-D formats, and you can also explode doughnut graphs:

Exploding the entire pie chart in Excel

The quickest way to explode the entire pie chart in Excel is to click it so that all of the slices get selected, and then drag them away from the center of the chart using the mouse.

For more precise control of the pie chart separation, do the following:

Pulling out a single slice of a pie chart

To draw your users’ attention to a certain slice of a pie, you can move it out from the rest of the pie chart.

And again, the quickest way to pull out an individual slice is to select it and drag away from the center using the mouse. To select a single slice, click on it, and then click it again so that only this slice is selected.

Note.

# Formatting Data Labels Of The Pie Chart

To do this select the More Options from Data labels under the Chart Elements or by selecting the chart right click on to the mouse button and select Format Data Labels.

This will open up the Format Data Label option on the right side of your worksheet. Click on the percentage. If you want the value with the percentage click on both and close it.

After this, you will see the percentage amount in each slice of your pie chart along with the values.

Make A Pie Chart In Spss

IBM SPSS statistics is software specifically designed for stats, especially in the social sciences. The software is capable of creating a large number of graph types with a huge variety of options. Unlike simpler programs like Excel, SPSS gives you a lot of options for creating pie charts.

Watch the video to see how to make a pie chart with the chart builder:

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Example : Create Custom Pie Chart

We can use the following arguments to customize the appearance of the pie chart:

• autopct: Display percentages in pie chart
• colors: Specify colors to use in pie chart
• title: Add title to pie chart

The following code shows how to use these arguments in practice:

df.groupby.sum.plot)

Note that the colors will be assigned to the categories as they appear in the DataFrame.

For example, team A appears first in the DataFrame, which is why it received the color red in the pie chart.

Make The Chart Details Work By Using Drill Down

Firstly, what do we mean my chart details? This is where you get a whole load more percentages to peruse because the details give you a further breakdown of the category that youve put in the legend.

In the example below, weve added the wine TYPE column into the Details bucket:-

Notice how the detail labels show percentages for the Details rather than SUPPLIER. Because of this, Ive had to display the legend so we can tell which colour is which supplier. Of course, this is how the pie chart has to behave because a pie chart must always show the ratio of the parts to the whole. But what were itching to do here is to show what percentage each wine type is of each suppliers sales, not of the total sales.

This is where the drill down can help us. If you put the TYPE column also in the Legend bucket under SUPPLIER, you can then drill down to the percentages for each SUPPLIER. To do this, click on the down pointing arrow to turn drill down on and then click on a suppliers segment in the pie chart. This will drill you down to show the breakdown of TYPE for each supplier and show you the percentage youre after. Notice how Ive included a table visual on the left so we can be sure which supplier were looking at.

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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.

Should A Pie Chart Add Up To 100

Pie Chart Mishaps and How to Avoid Them Simply put, pie charts are best used to show parts of a whole. Specifically, pie charts should illustrate meaningful relationships between percentages, or parts of 100%. If the data you want to display doesnt add up to 100%, a pie chart might not be your best choice.

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Constructing A Pie Chart

A pie chart is constructed by converting the share of each component into a percentage of 360 degrees. In Chart 5.4.2, music preferences in 14- to 19-year-olds are clearly shown.

The pie chart quickly tells you that

• half of students like rap best , and
• the remaining students prefer alternative , rock and roll , country and classical .

Tip! When drawing a pie chart, ensure that the segments are ordered by size and in a clockwise direction.

In order to reproduce this pie chart, follow this step-by-step approach:

If 50% of the students liked rap, then 50% of the whole circle graph would equal 180 degrees.

• Draw a circle with your protractor.
• Starting from the 12 oclock position on the circle, measure an angle of 180 degrees with your protractor. The rap component should make up half of your circle. Mark this radius off with your ruler.
• Repeat the process for each remaining music category, drawing in the radius according to its percentage of 360 degrees. The final category need not be measured as its radius is already in position.

Labelling the segments with percentage values often makes it easier to tell quickly which segment is bigger. If there are few categories, the percentage and the category label should be indicated beside their corresponding segments like in Chart 5.4.3. This way, users do not have to constantly look back at the legend in order to identify what category each colour represents.

Create A Helper Column For Percent

We need a cheat column that would keep a percent constant when filtered, so a helper column was in order. You have probably noticed that formulas look different in a table you still want to build them in the first cell of a column to carry them down.

We want the column to take the figures in column B and divide them by the total. The formula ends up looking like this: =/SUM

This looks complicated, but it is very automatic. Here were my keystrokes/mouse clicks:

, Type = / SUM .

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Creating A Pie Of Pie Chart In Excel

Suppose you have a data set as shown below:

If you create a single Pie chart using this data, there would be a couple of small slices in it.

Instead, you can use the Pie of Pie chart to zoom into these small slices and show these as a separate Pie .

Note

Here are the steps to create a Pie of Pie chart:

The above steps would insert the Pie of Pie chart as shown below.

The above chart automatically combines a few of the smaller slices and shows a breakup of these slices in the Pie on the right.

This chart also gives you the flexibility to adjust and show a specific number of slices in the Pie chart on the right. For example, if you want the chart on the right to show a breakup of five smallest slices, you can adjust the chart to show that.

Here is how you can adjust the number of slices to be shown in the Pie chart on the right:

The above steps would combine the 5 smallest slices and combine these in the first Pie chart and show a breakup of it in the second Pie chart on the right .

In the above chart, I have specified that the five smallest slices be combined as one and be shown in a separate Pie chart on the right.

You can also use the following criteria :

Point Explosion

Gap Width

What Makes A Bad Pie Chart

From a design point of view, a pie chart takes up far too much space to convey a set of data compared to other options. In addition, the labels dont line up, so the result becomes cluttered and hard to read strike three against pie charts, as they often make the data more complicated than before.

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How To Make/create A Pie Chart In Excel With Percentages

Let`s move on to a new example where we will be working with percentages. In this example, we have some students who will be voting for their favorite indoor game. The table which contains the whole information is given below.

We will make a pie chart of the information given in the table. This chart will give us information regarding the percentages of the vote of the students. Make a simple pie chart first by following the steps that I discussed in the beginning.

There are two ways of inserting percentages in your pie chart. Follow whichever process you like.

Ditch The Pie Chart For A Something Else

Why are you using a pie chart at all? In Secret #1 above, we gave you reasons not to use a pie chart. But how do you get the percentages showing in the data labels if you decide to use some other visual? Take a look at this example of a bar chart:-

You can see its show the percentages that you would get in the pie chart. To do this, all you need is a measure like this:-

Percent of Grand total = DIVIDE ,

CALCULATE )

Note: In the above measure, we have a column called Total Sales that sits in a table called Sales.

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Creating A Bar Of Pie Chart In Excel

Just like the Pie of Pie chart, you can also create a Bar of Pie chart.

In this type, the only difference is that instead of the second Pie chart, there is a bar chart.

Here are the steps to create a Pie of Pie chart:

The above steps would insert a Bar of Pie chart as shown below.

The above chart automatically combines a few of the smaller slices and shows a breakup of these slices in a Bar chart on the right.

This chart also gives you the flexibility to adjust this chart and show a specific number of slices in the Pie chart on the right in the bar chart. For example, if you want the chart on the right to show a breakup of five smallest slices in the Pie chart, you can adjust the chart to show that.

The formatting and settings of this Pie of bar chart can be done the same way we did for Pie of Pie charts.

How To Use Pie Charts To Filter Visuals

The best use of a pie chart is not to use it as a pie chart at all! Look at the visuals below. If I select Alliance in the pie chart, you can see in the bar chart below, that it highlights Alliances percentage sales for the different years.

Whats the secret? All I did was to create separate pie charts for each supplier. I use visual level filter to make sure that each pie chart only showed one supplier:-

I edited the chart titles so they reflected the supplier that I had filtered and I changed the detail label to only show the value and positioned it inside the pie chart. And thats about it! These pie charts work great to highlight the data in the bar chart. Notice Ive included the percentage measure that we did in Secret #6.

Hopefully, weve given you some food for thought. Either dont use a pie chart or at least be a little more adventurous. We cover a range of visualisations on both our Fundamentals and Advanced courses, meaning you can get in depth knowledge on exactly how to use these functions to your advantage. If you would like more information about our courses, get in touch with our team on 0800 0199 746.

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How To Make Them Yourself

First, put your data into a table , then add up all the values to get a total:

Next, divide each value by the total and multiply by 100 to get a percent:

Now to figure out how many degrees for each “pie slice” .

A Full Circle has 360 degrees, so we do this calculation:

Now you are ready to start drawing!

Draw a circle.

Then use your protractor to measure the degrees of each sector.

Here I show the first sector …

Finish up by coloring each sector and giving it a label like “Comedy: 4 “, etc.