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About this lesson
In this lesson we'll explore Power BI pie charts, donut charts and their characteristics.
Exercise files
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Pie Charts456.4 KB Pie Charts - Completed
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Quick reference
Pie Charts
Working with Pie and Donut charts in Power BI.
When to use
Pie and Donut charts can be used to show the proportion on one value vs the whole.
Instructions
Pie Charts and donut charts are very similar, with the latter essentially just being a Pie chart with a hole in the middle.
Layout
- Drag your descriptive Field into the Legend area. The unique items in this field will make up each slice.
- The measure(s) to indicate the size of the slices should be dropped into the Values area.
- The Details field allows further subdividing the pie into smaller slices color coded to the Legend. Use this field with caution as it tends to create too many data points.
Formatting
- Dragging multiple fields into the Legend area will activate Drill Down
- Dragging multiple fields into the Value area will subdivide the pie slices
- Visual formatting can be done via the fields under the paint roller in the Visualizations area
Hints & tips
Try to avoid using pie charts for more than three series of data, as they are too hard to read
Common Modifications for Pie Charts
- Providing a custom title for the chart
- Modifying the Data colors
- Replacing them with bar or column charts
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- 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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