create pie chart in excel with percentages

I think we make pie charts because they are safe. Pie chart is not the devil, a pie chart that fails to tell the story is. We have successfully converted a gazillion sliced pie chart to something meaningful and simple. You can speed up this step by setting first slice’s fill color to none and then using F4 key to repeat the last action (ie setting color to none) on other slices. Individually select each slice in the second pie and set the fill color to “none”. Format the Second Pie so that it is Invisible Select “Split series by” and set it to “percentage”. (In excel 2003, you have to go to “options” tab in format dialog to change this). We will ask excel to split the pies by Percentage. In the resulting dialog, you can change the way excel splits 2 pies. Click on any slice and go to “format series”Ĭlick on any slice and hit CTRL+1 or right click and select format option. Select “Pie of Pie” chart, the one that looks like this:Īt this point the chart should look something like this:Ģ. Just select your data and go to Insert > Chart.

Select Your Data Create a Pie of Pie Chart Interested? Then just follow these steps. The beauty of this trick is, it is completely automatic and all you have to do is formatting.

We will take the pie chart on left and convert it to the one on right. Today I want to teach you a simple pie chart hack that can improve readability of the chart while retaining most of the critical information intact. In fact I will go ahead and say that pie charts are actually the most widely used charts in business contexts. Jon Peltier can stand on his roof and shout in to a megaphone “ Use Bar Charts, Not Pies“, but the fact remains that most of us use pie charts sometime or other.

Create pie chart in excel with percentages