Pie Charts

Quick reference

• 00:05 The next chart type that we're going to look at,
• 00:07 I'll be totally honest, not my favorite, it's a pie chart.
• 00:11 If you asked individualization experts they'll tell you that pie charts are not
• 00:14 the best way to show information.
• 00:16 The challenge is however, is that your manager will ask for it by name and you
• 00:20 will be expected to provide it, which why we're gonna show you how to create one.
• 00:24 Power BI has two different versions of pie charts.
• 00:27 It has a pie chart, which is here,
• 00:29 it also has a donut chart which essentially a pie chart that's been shot.
• 00:33 It's got a hole in the middle, that's the only difference between the two.
• 00:37 Now, I'm gonna go create a pie chart, a regular old pie chart, and
• 00:42 what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna break this down by, let's say the location name and
• 00:47 I'm gonna figure out what the sales look like for my location using a pie chart.
• 00:52 And you'll see that we have a nice little piece here that shows us that we have our,
• 00:56 the has got a certain portion and ethical development.
• 00:58 If I mouse over it tells me what the sales are.
• 01:01 Maybe I could figure out something else by going,
• 01:03 I'd like a little bit more information here.
• 01:06 I'll go and grab Units and throw it in the Tooltips.
• 01:09 So that when I mouse over, I can actually see what the sales dollars are,
• 01:12 what the units are.
• 01:14 Hey, why not, we could probably even go and add something else to this.
• 01:17 Maybe we could add Budgets to give a more full and
• 01:21 clear picture as to what's actually going on, when somebody interacts with a visual.
• 01:25 It also shows the percentage of the whole,
• 01:27 is in the little brackets underneath the name behind Sales, which is great.
• 01:33 Now, can I do more with this visual?
• 01:35 Absolutely, we have the ability to break things down by details.
• 01:39 So I could look at this and say, well,
• 01:40 that's kinda interesting to know how big these are compared to everybody else.
• 01:44 But what if I were to come back to the categories and
• 01:47 drag this into the Details area.
• 01:50 It now segregates things by details.
• 01:53 But one thing that we do lose here is we lose our legend.
• 01:56 It's gone, we don't know who is what in this particular case.
• 02:00 So now, it's a really good idea to come over to our Formatting area here and
• 02:05 say show me a legend, so
• 02:07 that at least I know what these mean colors actually represents.
• 02:11 Now personally I prefer to see my legend down to the bottom,
• 02:15 I think that's a better place for it for me.
• 02:18 I might also like to see this font size increase, maybe not quite that much but
• 02:21 something a little bit bigger, so I can see what is actually happening.
• 02:25 And of course, I can go back and
• 02:26 tweak the titles and do other things to this as well.
• 02:31 The challenge with pie charts is when you start going with too much information.
• 02:35 We have the ability to control some of these things in different ways.
• 02:39 I could grab category, and I could say, instead of the details,
• 02:43 why don't I move it here under Location Name.
• 02:45 At this point now I can activate my drill down, so I can drill into ethical
• 02:49 development and I can see the shape of the pie chart and how it actually all
• 02:53 works out here again if I mouse over it all those Tooltips texts are there.
• 02:57 The key danger here is when you start to go in and add way too much stuff though.
• 03:01 Like Item Name.
• 03:02 Let's put that into the details field and notice what happens to this things.
• 03:07 Holy smokes, look at all those slices, that is crazy.
• 03:11 There's no way you gonna be able to figure it out, especially when you
• 03:13 realize you draw back up and that most granular level of details.
• 03:18 That was being used here too.
• 03:20 Yuck, okay, so, this is one of the things we definitely wanna watch out for.
• 03:25 One of the big rules of thumbs with pie charts is always to try and
• 03:28 make them as few data series as possible.
• 03:30 When you actually get into a state where you've got lots and lots and
• 03:33 lots of series, then it makes sense to move to something like a bar chart or
• 03:37 a column chart to actually show that data better.
• 03:39 Again these charts are all cross filterable,
• 03:41 they'll cross filter your other visuals.
• 03:43 As a matter of fact we see some interesting things with these as well.
• 03:46 I'm gonna go quickly cook up a bar chart here, I'm gonna throw the categories on it
• 03:50 with budget and I'm gonna just go and click on can of beer.
• 03:54 And you'll that it actually will cross filter the pie chart,
• 03:56 we get some funky little slices going on this particular case here.
• 04:00 Which all makes sense.
• 04:02 What if I were to go and do something slightly different though?
• 04:05 What if I were to throw another chart on?
• 04:08 And this one, I was to throw on the end of month.
• 04:12 And we won't aggregate it.
• 04:15 And we'll throw our Budget on here as well.
• 04:17 I'm gonna select a specific month.
• 04:19 So this is now, going to show a slightly different version of the pie chart
• 04:22 where it filters differently.
• 04:24 You can see that there's not much sales happening.
• 04:26 Apparently that affects all of these individual little categories in those
• 04:29 locations.
• 04:30 So, this is where things start to get a little bit more interesting.
• 04:34 Because you can start seeing what happens in the cross filtering and shading.
• 04:38 There's very tiny slice in here, very narrow but it's actually got some big
• 04:42 numbers that we can actually play around with and see what's actually going on.
• 04:45 So, it can be a neat visual but again, if it's got too many data points,
• 04:49 it's a better idea to actually shift it over into a different type of visual
• 04:53 to get better intel

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