How to Make a Pie Chart in Excel? A Step by Step Guide
(Note: This guide on how to make a pie chart in Excel is suitable for all Excel versions including Office 365)
Visual representations like graphs and charts are an amazing and innovative way to educate people on very intricate details. They help denote details in a simpler and easily understandable manner, which would be confusing using words. There are a variety of non-verbal methods to present data. Among them, the most popular form of visual representation is the pie chart.
The pie chart represents each data as a slice of the pie based on the percentage data. They are mostly used to denote individual amounts from a group.
You might be wondering how we deal with complicated data in Excel. Representing it in the form of a pie chart is more efficient. The good news is you can easily represent your data in the form of pie charts in Excel.
In this article, I will show you how to make a pie chart in Excel and customize them easily.
You’ll Learn:
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How to Make a Pie Chart in Excel?
Consider a class, 1-A of 50 students who have just finished their exams. Among them, 90% scored a perfect score in Math. 75% of the students scored 100 in Science and 95% scored the same in English. Also, 65% and 85% of the students have a perfect score in Social Science and Computer Science respectively.
In this example, we have the values on individual rows. Excel has the ability to identify values even if they are represented on individual columns.
Reading through the text is quite confusing right, especially when there is a large amount of data. Let us see how to make a pie chart in Excel for the given data.
First, select the data you are using for the pie chart. If you have only one table, you can straightaway click on the pie chart option and a pie chart will be created with all the elements/data in the table.
Go to Insert > Charts and select the pie chart option. You can choose between different pie charts from the dropdown.
Click on the pie chart of your choice. The chart gets added in the center of the sheet. You can move or resize the chart and place it wherever you want.
That is all. Creating a pie chart in Excel is so simple. Now, you can easily portray complex numeric data in an easily understandable form.
Note: You can also give an in-depth representation of any segment. Simply click on the chart, select the area you want to highlight, and drag the area a little out to the pie chart. This pops up the selected area and helps put more focus and depth on it.
Also Read:
How to Freeze Rows in Excel? 4 Easy Steps
How to Sort Dates in Excel? 6 Easy Methods
How to Filter in Excel? A Step-by-Step Guide
How to Customize a Pie Chart in Excel?
Clicking on the pie chart creates a default design for the fields with default colors and font. However, Excel offers you the liberty to customize your pie chart to your preferences. You can change the colors, font, style, and fields to your liking.
There are 2 ways to customize your pie chart.
Using Customize Shortcuts in the Pie Chart
The first way is to customize the pie chart directly by clicking on the pie chart. This shows three icons towards the right of the chart. They provide important options to customize your pie chart.
The first element is called Chart Elements. This helps you customize the text in the chart. You can change the position of the chart title, add or change the position of the labels, and choose the position for the legends to appear.
In every Chart Element, there is an option called “More Options”. Clicking this opens up a Format Chart Title pop-up which provides you in-depth additional customizing options to the chart.
The second element is the Style and Color options. This helps you change the background layout and color of the areas within the pie chart. Customizing the colors and background helps in providing an appealing look to the chart and makes it easier to present them.
The final element to customize your pie chart is the Filter option. This helps you to choose which elements to show on the pie chart.
Using Design and Format Options in the Main Menu
The other method to customize a pie chart offers extensive customization to your chart. You can do this by using the Design option in the main menu.
Click on the pie chart and click on the Design option from the main menu.
This opens up multiple options to customize your pie chart. I’ll explain the functionality of the fields one by one.
The first two options under the chart layout are very similar to the chart elements option in the customize shortcut. Here, you can select the layout, add or move texts, and alter the position of the fields.
The chart styles option is used to change the colors and choose the background layout of the pie chart.
Under the data section, there are two options.
The first option switch row/column swaps data plotted on the X-axis to move to Y-axis. That is it helps you to switch between the rows and columns of your table.
The second option select data is similar to the filter option in the customize shortcut option. You can add, edit, and remove the fields based on your preferences.
In case the pie chart is not the most feasible option for your data, you can also choose other chart types to create your charts based on the data.
In case you have to move a chart because it is hiding the other contents, or you need to move the content to another sheet in Excel, you can use the move chart option.
The Format option in the main menu also helps you customize your chart to your preferences
The first option is used to select the area for editing. Click on the dropdown and select the area you want to edit. Then you can resize and edit the selected area.
The shape styles option is used to change the background color of the chart. Also, you can change the border color and set shadows on the chart.
The WordArt option is used to change the font and color of the heading or legend texts inside the pie chart.
The arrange option is used to change the visibility and order of your pie charts. The bring forward, send backward, align and selection pane help you to structure, move and arrange the pie chart.
Finally, using the size option, you can set the accurate dimensions for the dimensions of the chart.
Suggested Reads:
How to Group in Pivot Table? ( 2 Easy Methods)
How to Use the Excel IFS Function? – 2 Easy Examples
How to Remove Hyperlinks in Excel? 3 Easy Methods
Closing Thoughts
Pie charts can be effective communication tools to help the audience understand complex data. Also, they provide a real-time comparison of the data points in an intuitive manner.
In this guide, we saw how to make a pie chart in Excel. We also showed you how to customize it based on your preferences. If you have any questions, please let us know in the comments.
If you need more high-quality Excel guides, please check out our free Excel resources center.
Simon Sez IT has been teaching Excel for over ten years. For a low, monthly fee you can get access to 130+ IT training courses. Click here for advanced Excel courses with in-depth training modules.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
