Building Pie Charts

Quick reference

• 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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