Add Pie Chart Leader Lines in Numbers

A new feature in Numbers is the ability to add leader lines to pie charts. This makes the charts look more professional and easier to follow. This also works with pie charts in Keynote and Pages.

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

Video Transcript: Let's take a look at another small change in the new Numbers version 4.1. This has to do specifically with pie charts. So here we've got a typical table that we might want to use as a pie chart. I'm going to select everything here so I can create a pie chart from these sale numbers.
I'm going to go to Chart, and select Pie Chart. There's my chart and it pretty much looks the same as before. I can choose different styles here on the right. All sorts of different things. But, the new feature is something if you look under Wedges, and I still want everything selected not an individual wedge but just everything, I can now choose Leader Lines. Now we don't see any difference now because the distance from center for these labels is less than 100%. So it's inside the pie chart.
If I move outside the pie chart you'll see the lines actually form right here. Before it looked like this so you wanted to keep everything kind of close in there. But now with leader lines you can actually use these lines here and you have lots of options as you can see. 
The main one is the style which is either straight out or angled. You can see the angled version looks rather nice and dignified. Either way we get to choose the type of lines. So you can do dash line. There we go dash line. We can do dotted line or solid. We can choose the color of the line. We can choose the thickness of the line. We can also choose end points. So we can have like arrows that point in or, you know, something on the outside. We can have it done anyway we want. 
In addition, if we did wedges that were out you can see it moves the lines out there. So you can set this on a per wedge basis. If I click in here to just change this here I can move this line further out and maybe make it a thicker line there or change it's color. All sorts of things. But I can't actually change the style. I have to have just either the straight or angled for all of them at once. So you get to do that.
You also get to do, if I select the entire thing again, you can see I can use the data point names as well as values. So I have an actual column here that has names and now I get to see things like oranges and peaches and everything in there. If I turn off the legend now you can see it looks pretty nice there. So I can do angled and maybe something a little closer in. Notice that since now this is different I if change it, it will reset it to all of them.
So a nice addition there for pie charts. It makes them look a lot nicer. A lot more professional and just something in general that you should know about in the new version of Numbers.

Comments: 4 Responses to “Add Pie Chart Leader Lines in Numbers”

Lazaro JOrdan

8 years ago

Very useful, thanks!

Ian Leckie

Excellent! Thanks!! Didn´t know about this. BUT...I can only get leader lines to show when working with a 2D pie chart, not a 3D one! I use a German version of Numbers 4.1 here in Germany, so I don´t know if this "restriction" applies to the US version you´re obviously using...??

Gary Rosenzweig

Ian: Right. This is for 2D pie charts only.

Thanks for replying, Gary! And I must say that 2D pie charts with leader lines (with all the variations you clearly pointed out) look, IMHO, much nicer and indeed more "professional" than 3D charts!

Comments Closed.

Add Pie Chart Leader Lines in Numbers

Comments: 4 Responses to “Add Pie Chart Leader Lines in Numbers”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information