Pie Chart in Excel (updated through Excel 2016)Įxample question: Make a pie chart in Excel that represents what percentage of people in a certain town own certain types of pets: pet owners own, you can’t put a husky-German shepherd mix in two categories, otherwise it will create larger pieces of the “pie” for those categories. For example, if you have a chart of what breeds of dog U.S. Note: When you make a pie chart, you must make sure that your categories don’t overlap, otherwise you’ll have a meaningless chart. Two of the most popular programs for making charts in elementary statistics or AP statistics classes are Microsoft Excel and IBM SPSS Statistics: It isn’t really necessary with the wide variety of computer programs that can make pie charts for you. Pie charts can be tricky to draw by hand, especially with tricky percentages the whole of the pie is 360 degrees, so drawing 13.9 percent or 56 percent presents a challenge. In the above graph, percentages are the numerical variables and the type of trash are the categorical variables.

In order to make a pie chart, you must have a list of categorical variables(descriptions of your categories) as well as numeric variables. You could read that New Yorkers (perhaps surprisingly) throw a lot of recyclables into their trash, but a pie graph gives a clear picture of the large percentage of recyclables that find their way into the trash.

The following chart shows what New Yorkers throw in their trash cans.

Pie charts give you a snapshot of how a group is broken down into smaller pieces. You can see that toilet water usage is greater than shower water usage because the piece of the “pie” is greater: The following chart shows water usage (image courtesy of the EPA).

Create pie chart in excel with data