A Detailed Look At Using Pie Charts In Numbers

Pie charts are a quick and simple way to represent data visually in your Numbers spreadsheets. There are a lot of options and variations.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a detailed look at using Pie Charts in Numbers. 
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.
Now pie charts are great to use in Numbers because they don't take a lot of data to create. All you really need are two or more numbers and you can have a pie chart. They are also easy for people to understand and they look really good. It is better than looking at wall of numbers.
So, for instance here is a simple table that just has some basic sales data in it. You can turn this easily into a pie chart. Just select the numbers, I'm just going to select these here but I could also have selected the entire table. Now I'm going to click Chart and now with 2D selected at the top I'm going to click here to create a pie chart. I've got this pie chart right here. Let me move it next to the table. Right off the bat it looks pretty good. But there are a ton of ways we can customize it. 
In the Format Sidebar, under Chart, you can customize the colors picking some premade color palettes here. Now I've got a bunch of chart options. You can have a title on or off. Then you could click and select the title and change it. You've got the Legend here which gives you the colors and the rows they match. You can turn that on or off. You can have a caption below and you can customize that. You can change the Font to use. So I can change it to something else or make it bigger or smaller and it applies to the whole chart. Change the style. I can also change the chart colors by clicking here and you could see I get more options than the styles that are just there. So I've got all of these and I can choose Images, or Textures and really make the chart look good without having to do much extra work. There are actually a ton of different textures that you can use here. 
Now if we go to Wedges, this is where you can really do a lot. So here we can decide whether or not we see values or names. So I can have the name of each one there making this Legend here unnecessary. I can just have the names if I want. Now, I can also do the data value format. So here it is percentage by default. But I can have it show the actual numbers if I want. I can add some text before or text after the numbers. I could change the label options. Let's switch this to the datapoint names and I'm going to use distance from center. You can see I can bring it closer to the center or further away. If I bring it out you can see the text color actually change to be black over the white there. So it doesn't become invisible. You can see the lines form. I can turn Off the lines. I can make the lines straight or angled which is this nice effect right here. I can change the thickness of the line. The type of line. The color of the line. Even have end points like, for instance, arrows pointing to each individual one. 
Now you can also change wedge position so you can change the distance from center. So you can break these apart like that which looks fine if you do it for all. But I'm going to show you how to do it for each individual wedge in a second. But the important one to know here is the rotation angle because this starts here with bananas and then goes to the right. You get something that has a divider line right here at the top. But what if you wanted to have it rotate somewhere else like have bananas take up the top area like that. So you can set the rotation angle to whatever you want. 
Now you can change these wedge options for individual wedges. So, for instance, I can click here and I've just chosen this one wedge. So now you can see under Format Wedge I still have all of these options. So I can have the value for this one item here. I can have the distance from center for the label here so I can have this pop out like that with a leader line if I wanted to. I could have the wedge position distance from center change. So I can have this one wedge come out like that to emphasize that this is the wedge that I want people looking at this chart to pay attention to. Note I can select multiple wedges. So I can select this wedge here and then I'm going to hold the Command Key down and select these other wedges. I can take away the datapoint names like that. So I can just have this one label here.
Now if you want to change the color of a wedge you can select the wedge and you can go to Style and then here you've got the Fill. You can change the Fill for this individual wedge. So, for instance, I can make this one black like that. So you really can customize the wedges to be exactly the colors that you want. You can even set a stroke around it. So I can make this, say, a red border.
So if you use Numbers a lot and you think you might want to use pie charts what I encourage you to do is to create a sample chart like this and then play around with all of these different values. Try doing different things with each wedge. Try doing different things with the text. With all of the different options. Learn how to do it now. If you find that you need to create a pie chart you won't be trying things out right there on the spot. You'll already know how to get the result you want. 
Now I want to show you a few more tips. One of them is using a chart like this you'll see that pie charts are pretty smart. If you have all of this data here but you just want to have these three items here, the sums of all the sales for each of these products, you can create a pie chart for that by just selecting these three cells. Go to Chart. Notice it uses the three cells you have selected. It even gets the column names and  if you go to Wedges and say datapoint names you can see it understands that you are using the sums here of these three columns and will set everything up appropriately.  
Now the next thing I want to show you is what if you have a pie chart like this where some of the items are really small slices, like that. You can see the pie chart looks pretty ugly. You can't really tell what these are. They kind of all mash together. What you would normally see in a professionally made pie chart is these groups together and just showing Other. You can do that with pie charts pretty easily. So first I want to make sure that I've sorted everything here so that it is descending so the largest slices first and all of the small slices are grouped together. Now I'm going to select the smallest slices, like that one, and then hit the Delete Key, to delete it from the pie chart. I'm going to delete this one as well. But this is the one I want to use to represent all three. So with this one selected I'm going to go to Format Wedge and you can see under data it says value. What I can do here is I could actually go in to Edit it and then I've got the Pears one there. So I'll do + and then Apples + Peaches. Now when I hit Return you could see this slice now includes all three of those added together. In addition, I could change the name. So I want to go in here and delete that which is basically just showing the word pears from this cell. I'm going to use a double quote and then type Other and another double quote. Now I've changed this to say whatever I want, in this case Other. So now I've got these three slices here and this other slice. This other slice represents the sum of these three. 
Now if you really want your pie chart to standout, instead of using a 2D pie chart you can use a 3D pie chart. You can create a 3D pie chart by clicking on 3D at the top of the Chart Creation Menu there and then choosing the 3D pie chart. You can convert an existing 2D pie chart by just going to Format, Chart and changing the chart type to 3D pie. Then it changes to a pie chart. All of the things I showed you before work the same. You can go in and change individual wedge and set colors and all of that. But in addition when you just select it you've got this 3D manipulator here in the middle. Click and just drag around. You also have under Format, Chart here a 3D Scene section. So you can see here you can do Chart Depth like that. You can select a different lighting style if you want. You can have bevels for each individual wedge there. So you can make your pie chart look ever more interesting by using a 3D one instead of a 2D chart. 
Now I do want to point out there is a close relative to the pie chart called the doughnut chart. So I'm going to go to Format, Chart with the chart selected. I'm going to switch this one to a 2D Doughnut. But I could have just created one from the beginning. What this makes is a chart that looks a lot like a pie chart but with the middle cutout. There are still a lot of the same thing. They are called segments instead of wedges. But you still have all the same controls and I can maybe bring these out or even bring the names inside. Another reason people like to use doughnut charts is that sometimes they like to put an image in the middle. So you could take, say, a shape and you could put that right there like that or a picture of something. People like to do that and it makes it easier to see especially if there are several doughnut charts, which chart is which. 
So I hope you found this look at using pie charts in Numbers useful. Keep in mind you can also do pie charts in Pages and in Keynote as well. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 5 Responses to “A Detailed Look At Using Pie Charts In Numbers”

Jason Volz

1 year ago

Thank you for another great video!

Jasper

There seems to be a problem with saving user-defined chart styles in Numbers. If you modify the chart, then go to Format > Chart > Chart Styles and scroll right, you get a '+' button. This should save the format for future use. For the past few years this has never actually worked: The modified chart was never available. I've just tested again now. I could save the chart style but it's only available in that specific Numbers file. Am I missing something?

Gary Rosenzweig

Jasper: Note that when you use Styles in Pages, Numbers and Keynote, that is for the current document only. If you want to create other documents with the same Styles, then you need to make a custom template. See https://macmost.com/how-and-why-to-make-your-own-pages-template.html

Tom

Not sure are which version of Numbers this is. I've got 13.2 (wedges are now called segments). I can't find any way to use names in my table data to label my pie chart.

Tom: This video is from only 4 months ago, so I don't think anything has changed.

Comments Closed.

A Detailed Look At Using Pie Charts In Numbers

Comments: 5 Responses to “A Detailed Look At Using Pie Charts In Numbers”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information