When to use a pie chart Pie charts, on the other hand, show categories as a proportion of a whole. You can think of the circle as the total—100%—and the width of each slice is determined by ...

Pie charts also do badly when there are lots of categories. For example, this chart from a study on data sources used for COVID data visualisation shows hundreds of categories in one pie.

Excel 1. Open Microsoft Excel on your PC or Mac. 2. Open the document containing the data that you'd like to make a pie chart with. Click and drag to highlight all of the cells in the row or ...

Right-click any single piece of the pie chart. Choose "Format Data Point" and select "Fill." Click a new solid color for the pie piece. This is useful when you don't want any of Excel's color choices.

Pie charts also work well for displaying discrete data, as all the values combined equal 100 percent of the total. Because of this, pie charts are also a good way to display your values as ...

Data range: Adjust the cell range for the chart by adding to it or removing from it. X- or y-axis: Depending on your graph type, you can display, remove, or add labels to the x- or y-axis.

Additionally, pie charts are meant to illustrate percentages of a whole – using a pie chart for data that is not a percentage is both inaccurate and ineffective.