Building Pie Charts

Quick reference

• 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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