How To Add Pie Charts To Your Mac Pages Documents

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to create pie charts in Pages. 

One of the most popular types of charts, and the easiest to make, is the Pie Chart. 

So to make a Pie Chart in Pages you can just position the cursor where you want to insert the pie chart in your text. Then you can click the Chart button or use Insert and then Chart and then look for either 2D Pie or 3D Pie. Or if you click here you can just look for the pie chart here and click that. Either one will insert a sample pie chart. It appears like this. It has some sample data in it. It has 6 months and each one has a number assigned to it and it shows the pie chart for each month. You can see here April is the largest month, May the next largest month, and so on. You'll be able to change this data to whatever you want. Let's start by doing that. 

There's a big button here, Edit Chart Data, underneath. If you don't see it, it's probably because you don't have the pie chart selected. For instance I don't have it selected now. I'm editing text here and I don't have it selected. But if I click on it you'll see Edit Chart Data underneath. Click that and a window will appear that allows you to edit the names for each slice and the amounts for each. So, for instance, we can change April to A. May to B. June to C. July to D. I can scroll over and let's change August to E. So let's get rid of September. Say we only have 5 things here. I can click on the little Context Menu button here in the Header Cell and now I can delete this column. Now I can change these values here. So, for instance, let's make D the largest slice here by changing that to 126. You can alter these values as you like and you can add new ones simply by entering data into the last column that will appear there as blank. Close this window and you'll see that the pie chart now reflects the changes you've made. 

Now let's get it to look like we want. With this selected go to the Format Sidebar. So if you don't see it click on Format there. You'll see three different categories here. Chart, Wedges, and Arrange. Let's start with Chart. At the top we've got various styles. You can choose another style, like say this one, or this one. Let's go and stick with this style here. You've got options here. You can have a title at the top. Once you have the title there you can double click in it to edit that title. You've got the Legend which is this here at the top. You can turn that Off if you want to represent all of the individual labels inside of the pie chart. You have a Caption which is like a title but it is just underneath instead of on top. So you can have all of those. You can also choose the Font used by the entire chart. So, for instance, let's change it to something else, like for instance Arial, like that. We can change it to Bold if we want. We can increase or decrease the size. 

We also can choose Colors. So if we click here we get different color options. Let's choose something a little nicer. I'll go to the next set here and choose, say, these grays and browns there. Notice that there are different sets here. There are images where you can choose some that are textured and more textures right here. There are actually things like wood and marble and such. We'll stick with these colors right here. You also can choose Background which allows you to add a background behind the pie chart. So, for instance, instead of white I can have it be green like that. Or you can just leave it at No Background Fill. You can do a Shadow. A Shadow can be useful. Use Grouped to have a shadow under the entire chart. Then here we can set the Blur amount for it. The Offset, the Angle of the Shadow like that, the Opacity and we can get a nice little shadow under there. It makes it pop-up out of the page. 

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Next, let's go to Wedges. When you go to wedges here first you'll see things like Data Point Names and Values. So, notice it just has the values here. But I can have the names there as well. So there are those letters. I can get rid of the values if I wanted. I also can change the data value formats. Right now it is percentage but I can actually have it use the exact number that is saved in the chart under Edit Chart Data. You can choose the decimal places and thousand separates and all of that. You can actually have different text appear before or after the number. So if you had a particular unit, say M for meters for instance, you can do that and then just have it be numbers like that. 

You can also change the distance of these from the center. So, if I move it out you can see I can actually have them pop-out from the pie chart and then little lines are drawn. These are leader lines and you can turn them off here or change things about them, like make them thicker or a different color. You can actually have them be angled instead of straight. You can have end points like little arrows like that. So there is a lot you can do with those. But if you're less than 100% or even close to it then it is just going to be inside the pie chart instead of outside. 

You can also go down here to Wedge Position and you can change distance from center and break the wedges out. This works really well if you do it for only one wedge. How you do that is when you have Wedges selected here, just double click on this on the wedge you want. So, for instance, let's say what we're talking about here in the text really has to do with what A represents. So if I double click here and just select A then I can change things for A itself. For instance I can change distance from center just for A and have A coming out like that. I can also change the wedge position and move the wedge out like that which really breaks that out from the rest of the data. I can even choose other wedges, I'll choose this one, and I'll Shift Click and select these and say, Don't Show Me the Names or Values for these. I just want it for A. You can also click to select just the text in here. Once you do you'll just see wedge labels here and you can change individual labels. For instance I can make this one not bold or I can make it a color that will kind of blend in more, like that. I can even add a shadow to the individual label. To deselect the wedge you can just click outside and then select the entire chart again. 

Let's go back to Format Wedges and we've got Rotation Angle here at the bottom. You can rotate the entire thing. So if it's important that A, say, B going out to the right like that you can make it like that. But also notice that when you do select an individual wedge you've got a Style Section here. You can change the Style of this individual wedge. So, for instance, if I wanted to make this red, I could. So I'm selecting the actual style of the wedge itself, not changing it for the rest of the pie chart. But when you select the entire pie chart then the last section here is Arrange and this is all the same stuff that you will see if, say, you had an image or a shape in your document. This is where you set Text Wrapping and whether it is Inline with the text. Or whether it is something that moves on its own inside the text like that. You can also change the size right here. Notice I can drag the edges of the pie chart, like that, any of these dots here to change the size. That's not going to change the size of font in there. So I may need to adjust that afterwards. But I can set it to something very specific. So if I want it to be 3" wide I can set to exactly 3" wide. 

Now let's go back again to the Chart Category here in the sidebar and go down to Chart Type. So you can actually take this chart, keep its data, and choose change it to another chart type, like a 2D column or 2D lines. But since we're talking about pie charts here let's go down to the 3D section and note there is a 3D pie chart as well as a 2D pie chart. If I select that it's going to keep almost all the settings from the 2D pie chart. But now I can grab the middle here and rotate it around since it is a 3D object now. So, I can set it up like that. Some things I'll have to reset. Like, for instance, I'll choose a New Style here. I can also choose Colors. So I'll go back to similar colors to what I had before, like that. I can position it like this. I also have some things under 3D Scene here. I can do the Chart Depth like that. I can do the Lighting Style. I can add Bevels to the edges there to make it easier to see what is there. But I still have everything else. Like, for instance, under Wedges here I can still select an individual wedge, like this, and then move the wedge position away from the center, like that, and the Label away as well. Although it doesn't draw lines in 3D. So I want to keep it pretty close. 

Also note that if you are working in Numbers and you want a pie chart that represents some data from here in Pages you can. I'm going to select this table here and I'm going to create a chart. Notice this looks just like it does in Pages. I'm going to create a pie chart from this data here. Then I'm going to select a Style, maybe setup some other changes. So I've got this. This is exactly what I want to have in Pages. I don't have to recreate it in Pages. I can just select it and then go to Edit and then Copy, or Command C. Then in Pages here I can use Edit and Paste, Command V, and I get the pie chart exactly like it was in Numbers. I can edit the data and see that the data is all represented there. I can now edit it and make changes here in Pages just like if I created this in Pages. The data is no longer linked to Numbers so any changes here won't be reflected in Numbers and vice versa. 

So if you need pie charts in your Pages document hopefully this helped you out. Thanks for watching.