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About this lesson
Learn how to build an effective pie chart, and when you should and shouldn’t use them.
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Exercise files
Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ Excel workbooks from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.
Building Pie Charts - 2010.xlsx9.8 KB Building Pie Charts - 2010 - Completed.xlsx
11.9 KB Building Pie Charts - Extra Practice.xlsx
19.9 KB
Quick reference
Topic
How to build an effective pie chart, and when you shouldn’t use them.
When to use
When you need to convey a simple percentage value or a maximum of 3 data series that need to be displayed as a proportion. (If there are more than 3 data series, reach to a bar or column chart instead.)
Instructions
Before you start, be aware
- Your brain is not good at working with angles or areas
- If you have more than 3 data series, move to a different chart style (bar or column)
Creating a Pie Chart
- Select A7:B8
- Go to Insert > Charts > Pie and choose the 2-D pie in the top left corner
Adding context
- Select the chart, go to Chart Tools > Layout > Chart Title > Above Chart
- Select the chart title, press the equals key, click on A4 and press Enter
- Chart Tools > Layout > Legend > Show Legend at Bottom
- Right click the pie and choose Add Data Labels
- Right click the Data Labels and choose Format Data Labels
- Select Percentage, clear the Values, set the label position to Center and click Close
Reducing ink
- Right click the largest area of the pie and choose Format Data Series
- Set the Border Color to a Solid line, with a dark green colour
- Set the Fill to No fill
- Without leaving the dialog, select the smaller pie wedge
- Set the Border Color to a Solid line, with a dark red colour
- On the Series Options tab, set the Point Explosion to 10% and click Close
- 00:04 Before we talk about how to actually build a pie chart
- 00:07 we should talk about when they should be used and when they really shouldn't be used
- 00:12 more to the point when they shouldn't be used.
- 00:14 A lot of people reach to pie charts as the first type of chart they ever throw into a project.
- 00:18 Managers ask for them by name, it's really popular, people just love them.
- 00:22 And yet pie charts are actually a terrible way for conveying information.
- 00:27 Our brains are really bad at interpreting angles and areas to try to figure out what proportions are.
- 00:33 It is actually much easier for us to look at a line chart, a bar chart or a column chart
- 00:38 and say that line is longer than another one and this is by how much.
- 00:42 Once we start adding areas to it and angles it gets really difficult.
- 00:45 You only need to try and teach a child how to read an analog clock versus a digital clock to see that that's true.
- 00:52 By rule of thumb never try and plot more than three series on a pie chart
- 00:57 and even when you do that, you want to go and actually add indicators to it to show what the numbers are
- 01:02 so that people can get the information they want out.
- 01:05 One area where I do use pie charts on occasion is to go and show a percent complete.
- 01:11 So something that only has two series; that can actually work quite well.
- 01:15 Let's get to actually building one of those now.
- 01:18 The first thing we need to do is to go and select our data. So we're going to select the data in A7:B8
- 01:26 go to the Insert menu and choose to insert a Pie chart.
- 01:30 We will choose the 2D pie chart in the top left hand corner.
- 01:34 And this creates this horrendously ugly looking pie chart.
- 01:38 So when we've got our chart selected we get our Chart Tools at the top, let's go up to Layout so we can add some context here.
- 01:45 We'll add a chart title
- 01:47 above the chart and that creates a chart title that very helpfully says chart title.
- 01:53 If we have it selected we can press equals
- 01:57 and then we can click cell A4 and hit Enter and it will actually link the chart title to the cell so every time you go and update
- 02:04 cell A4 that will actually push directly into the chart and that's a little bit better.
- 02:09 While we're here too let's move the legend underneath the chart. Go to Legend,
- 02:14 show legend at bottom and that'll put it under the chart so we have a little bit
- 02:18 more that we can do with this a little bit later on.
- 02:22 Now a pie chart is not very useful without having some numbers on it so we're going to select the pie chart.
- 02:28 Right click it and say Add Data Labels and that will put some data labels on the chart that give us the chart quantities that we have over here.
- 02:37 I'm going to change that. Select the data label, right click it,
- 02:41 go to Format Data Labels
- 02:45 and what you can see now is that I can add the Percentages and remove the Values
- 02:51 and now I have the percentages on the chart. Which is better.
- 02:54 I can also click the label position on Center and that will actually put it right into the middle of the chart which looks a little bit better as well.
- 03:02 Now the next thing that I'm going to do is that I find pie charts when you put them on a report, the color saturations are so dense that it
- 03:09 actually violates best practice rules for charting which is to reduce the ink on the charts.
- 03:14 It causes the chart to pop right out and take over the whole report too which is not usually the intention of the pie chart itself. What we would
- 03:21 rather have is we would rather have just the information we want. So be able to
- 03:25 see it when we need it and sort of let it fade out when we don't.
- 03:28 So to do that we'll remove the ink from this chart. We select the pie,
- 03:32 you'll notice that my Format Data Series has changed automatically here.
- 03:37 I'm going to go to my border colour,
- 03:40 I'm going to change it to a Solid line and I'm going to change it to a dark green.
- 03:46 Next up I'm going to go to the Fill and I'm going to set it to No fill and that sets it
- 03:51 all to white so much less ink. Unfortunately this doesn't look all that attractive now.
- 03:57 What I can do is I can click on the specific wedge that represents the portion spent
- 04:03 and I can actually go back into my border colours and
- 04:07 set this to a different border colour: dark red and
- 04:11 that'll actually show on just that, sorry, on the amount remaining it's not the amount spent . That'll show me just that particular wedge.
- 04:19 The last thing I'm going to do with this is go back to the Series Options and I'm going to make a,
- 04:24 just a small, 10% Explosion on this just to move that wedge out.
- 04:29 Once I do that I get a chart that's
- 04:32 something that's not very big it can fade into the background when I don't need it or it can
- 04:36 be there when I do. The last thing I need to do with it is just move my
- 04:41 borders in to make a little bit less white space and now I've got a pretty good looking and effective pie chart.
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