Building Pie Charts

Quick reference

• 00:04 Bar none, the pie chart is the most overused and
• 00:07 incorrectly used chart that we actually see in business intelligence documents.
• 00:11 The most important thing that I want you to remember about a pie chart is that pie
• 00:15 charts measure proportion.
• 00:17 So if we take a look at the formula I have here,
• 00:20 I'm dividing 26,784 by the total of this column.
• 00:24 This is what the pie chart is going to actually show you.
• 00:27 It never shows you hard values, it always shows you proportions.
• 00:31 The other thing that's important to remember about a pie chart is that we use
• 00:34 them to show that one point is bigger than all the rest.
• 00:37 If there are more than three slices, you're picking the wrong chart type.
• 00:41 Go and use something like a bar chart or a column chart to make your point.
• 00:46 Now, let's build a pie chart.
• 00:48 The first and most important thing is to select the correct data.
• 00:50 We never want to pull in the totals, because the chart automatically takes care
• 00:54 of that when it's working out the proportion.
• 00:57 So we're going to go into Inserts > Recommended Charts, and
• 01:01 what you're going to see here is that Microsoft almost always recommends
• 01:05 a different chart type over pie.
• 01:08 However, in this case, we know what we're doing, so we're going to go and
• 01:13 select a pie chart here and say OK.
• 01:15 As I said, this plots a proportion.
• 01:17 We now know that this one here is about 83% by mousing over it, and
• 01:22 this one is about 17, but we still have some work to do.
• 01:26 I'm going to grab the chart title, I'm going to link it back to the cell to give
• 01:30 it some context of what I'm trying to show.
• 01:32 The other thing that is critically important with this is that you should
• 01:36 never release a pie chart without having the percentages on it.
• 01:39 So what we're going to do is we're going to go right-click on this, and
• 01:43 we're going to choose to add some data labels.
• 01:45 You'll notice here that it's actually giving me values for my data labels.
• 01:49 This is not what I want to see, I actually want the proportions.
• 01:52 So I'm going to go right-click and choose to format the data labels.
• 01:56 Now, you'll notice I can have the values and percentages both in there, and
• 02:00 that's fine if we want to do that, but at a minimum, you need the percentage.
• 02:04 I'm going to turn off that value and
• 02:06 I'm going to kick this to be on the outside, oop, here we are, outside, and
• 02:11 so it actually fits outside the actual pie chart itself.
• 02:15 I'm also going to change that number format up.
• 02:17 I'm going to add a little bit more precision on this one here.
• 02:19 So we're going to go back and we're going to say, let's go and
• 02:23 do a percentage here.
• 02:24 And we're going to go and use one decimal place on this.
• 02:27 That looks quite nice, I'm happy with the way that goes.
• 02:30 And this pie chart isn't so bad, but
• 02:32 there is still something that I want to change about this.
• 02:36 I find that pie charts are very, very intrusive on a report due
• 02:41 to the incredibly dense color fills that we actually have.
• 02:45 So if you've got one of these on a report, there's just no looking away from it,
• 02:48 it's going to keep calling your attention back over and over again, and
• 02:51 that's not what I want.
• 02:52 So I'm going to show you how we can actually make this a little bit less
• 02:56 obnoxious by softening it a bit.
• 02:58 To do that, I'm going to go and select the chart, and then what I'm going to do is
• 03:02 I'm going to select it again, and there's a very subtle difference to this.
• 03:07 But what you'll notice is that when I go to my right-click menu,
• 03:11 I get Format Data Point.
• 03:13 If I go back here for a second and select the chart again,
• 03:16 you'll notice that it's Format Data Series.
• 03:18 So if I drill in on the point itself by selecting it,
• 03:21 then we get into Format Data Point.
• 03:23 The reason this is important is because I can then go in and
• 03:27 choose my fill and my border for just this one data point.
• 03:32 I'm going to put a solid line on my data point, that is blue,
• 03:37 but I'm going to say, No Fill for the actual slice itself.
• 03:42 I am going to do the same thing for this data point by selecting it.
• 03:46 I'm going to go and give a solid line for the outside and No Fill for the inside,
• 03:50 although I'm not really happy with the solid line I got, because it's also blue.
• 03:55 So I'm going to go and change this one to orange.
• 03:58 The last thing that I might do with this, select outside,
• 04:03 select the chart again, and then maybe just go and explode the pie just
• 04:08 a little bit to get that slice out so that we can see what's going.
• 04:12 With the data label precision that we have here,
• 04:15 this is a less obnoxious chart that tells the story that I want.
• 04:18 Spent is the majority of what we've actually done.
• 04:21 There's only 17.5% remaining.
• 04:24 If you have more than three slices in your pie, as I say,
• 04:27 switch it out to a bar or column chart, it's probably a better choice.
• 04:30 But this is a way to make your pie chart effective, tell the story that you're
• 04:35 actually looking for without being overly obnoxious on your report.

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