Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Learn how to build an effective pie chart, and when you should and shouldn’t use them.
Exercise files
Download this lesson’s related exercise files.
Building Pie Charts.xlsx15.1 KB Building Pie Charts - Completed.xlsx
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Quick reference
Topic
Building pie charts in Mac Excel 2016.
Description
How to build an effective pie chart, and when you shouldn’t use them.
Where/when to use the technique
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 --> Recommended Charts and select the pie chart
Adding context
- Select the chart title, press the equals key, click on A4 and press Enter
- Click on the pie chart
- Right click and choose Add Data Labels
- Right click the Data Labels and choose Format Data Labels
- Select Percentage and clear the Values
- Set the label position to Center
Reducing ink
- Click the largest area of the pie twice (slowly, not a double click) to select the series
- Change the Outline to a dark green from the mini-toolbar
- Click the smallest area of the pie twice (slowly, not a double click) to select the series
- Change the Outline to a dark red from the mini-toolbar
- Select a worksheet cell, then right click the entire pie
- Set the fill to “No Fill”
- Right click the smallest point on the pie and choose “Format Data Point”
- Set the Point Explosion to 10%
- 00:04 >> In this video we're gonna look at one of the most over used chart types that
- 00:09 exist, and that is pie charts.
- 00:11 Now if you've worked in any kind of business for any amount of time, you're
- 00:15 gonna have a manager somewhere who's asked you to put a pie chart on a report.
- 00:18 And I'm gonna tell you today that I don't think pie charts are a very good
- 00:22 way of visually representing data.
- 00:24 The reason for that is because your brain actually has a very difficult time
- 00:28 interpreting angles where it's much,
- 00:30 much better at determining the length of straight lines.
- 00:33 Despite this, a lot of people ask for pie charts, we've grown up with them,
- 00:36 they look like clocks, and all that kinda stuff, so people are used to them.
- 00:39 But if you can actually move your data into a bar chart or
- 00:43 column chart, you're usually gonna get a much better and
- 00:45 much faster read out of your data than with a pie chart, less questions.
- 00:51 Especially if you get more than three data series,
- 00:52 that's an extremely important move to a bar chart or a column chart.
- 00:55 But if you get a manager who insists you use a pie chart, or if anything I've said
- 01:01 hasn't convinced you and you love them anyway, I'm gonna show you how to build
- 01:03 a pie chart that has less challenges than some of the other one's that I've seen.
- 01:09 First thing that I'm gonna do is I'm gonna highlight my data and remember,
- 01:12 pie charts measure everything as a percentage of a whole.
- 01:15 So I'm gonna grab the spent remaining from my forecast and the values.
- 01:19 I'm gonna go to insert, recommended charts, and you'll even notice that
- 01:23 the bar chart or the column chart rather is recommended over the pie chart, but
- 01:27 we'll take our pie chart here.
- 01:29 Now the pie chart has been created, and that's great.
- 01:34 We're gonna make some changes to this to make it a little bit more effective.
- 01:38 One of the big issues I have with a pie chart in the default system that it
- 01:42 comes out in is the color saturation is extremely dense.
- 01:45 And this means that if you put one of these on a page,
- 01:48 no matter what other valuable information you have,
- 01:50 your pie chart is going to be screaming for your attention.
- 01:53 It's saying look at me, look at me, look at me.
- 01:56 So, I'm gonna show you some tricks to try and actually fix that.
- 02:00 First thing we'll do, we'll give it a title,
- 02:02 this is always important to provide context.
- 02:04 So we'll just say equals, and link it back to our original cell.
- 02:09 I'm actually going to get rid of this legend because you'll see we're not going
- 02:13 to need it in a second, so we'll get rid of that.
- 02:16 And what I'm gonna do right now is I'm gonna right-click, and
- 02:19 I'm gonna say add data labels.
- 02:21 And I think data labels are critically important with a pie chart, because
- 02:25 people need to understand what the values are that are actually going in here.
- 02:29 Now these are very, very small, so let's quickly go back to the home tab and
- 02:33 change the font size up to something that we can actually read.
- 02:36 That's a little bit better.
- 02:37 And now, I'm gonna right click and I'm going to format my data labels and
- 02:41 I want to show you that you've got some choices in here.
- 02:44 We could put on the series name.
- 02:48 That's series one, series one, that really doesn't help us all that much so
- 02:51 we won't bother with that one.
- 02:52 We could put the category name.
- 02:55 Well that's interesting,
- 02:55 now we're actually getting somewhere to tell us exactly what's going on with this.
- 02:59 We got remaining and we got spent.
- 03:01 We could put the percentage in as well, which means we could get rid of the value.
- 03:08 Not too bad, okay, we're spent, 83% remaining, there we go, so
- 03:12 that's kinda cool.
- 03:13 Now the next thing that I wanna do is I wanna get away from this huge
- 03:16 thing where it's actually yelling at me.
- 03:18 But first, I'm actually just gonna move my label position to the center,
- 03:20 I think that will look a little bit better.
- 03:22 There we go, so, I.m going to grab the dark blue wedge here.
- 03:27 I've clicked once, I've waited and I'm gonna click again.
- 03:31 And you'll notice there's a very subtle change here.
- 03:34 What I'm gonna do with this now is I'm gonna go to the fill bucket on the right
- 03:39 hand side here and I'm gonna change the border.
- 03:43 To a solid line, and I'm gonna, well I'll leave it with dark blue, that's fine.
- 03:48 I'm then gonna go to fill and I'm gonna go with no fill.
- 03:52 And you notice that that wipes out a whole amount of stuff and you think holy cow,
- 03:55 that's pretty drastic.
- 03:56 Well, yeah, maybe.
- 03:57 Let me grab this other wedge here, the orange one.
- 04:01 And we'll say, this one also is gonna have no fill,
- 04:04 I'm gonna give it a solid line as well.
- 04:07 But this one I'll make a solid line that is dark orange.
- 04:11 Something a little bit different.
- 04:14 The other thing that i'd like to do with this is I'd also like to explode the data
- 04:19 point out a little bit and we've gotta figure out where that actually is.
- 04:23 There we go, it's gonna be under the little dashes here.
- 04:25 We're gonna explode this data point out just a little bit to get a little
- 04:30 bit more room so we can see what's going on.
- 04:33 This pie chart is a little bit more effective than what you see come directly
- 04:36 out of the box.
- 04:37 And the reason being is because it tells us what the percentages are.
- 04:40 We may wanna use our original numbers, that's fine.
- 04:43 But the other thing is is it doesn't have a hugely dense color saturation
- 04:47 hue on it when you print it on a report.
- 04:49 This is nice because it means that the other information on the page is just as
- 04:53 valuable.
- 04:53 We'll have equal precedent in your brain with this thing.
- 04:56 Your pie chart will be there, but when you don't need it, it will fade from view so
- 05:00 that you can focus on the rest of the elements on the page.
- 05:02 So this is one of the things that I like to do with my pie charts is
- 05:05 wipe out that internal fill and use a border around them instead.
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