Creating Goal Charts In Mac Numbers

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to build a Goal Chart in Numbers. 

So a Goal Chart would be a graphic that shows your progress on the way to a goal. Like if you're trying to raise some money it shows you how close you are to that goal or maybe you're trying to use it to track exercise or some other habit. So let's start completely from scratch in Numbers with a blank template document here. I'm going to create something simple to track a goal. Let's say we have date, a name, and amount to track donations. Those are the only three columns we need. So you may have something like a Date, like that, and a Name, and then say an amount, like that. I'm not going to bother to fill in the rest of the dates or names. It's only the amount that matter. Let's say we've got a bunch of different numbers here. Then let's name this table Donations. This is the table we're going to use to just track the donations. We may be doing that anyway. 

Now, we want to create a chart that's going to take the total from this amount column and compare that to a goal. So let's create a Utility Table where we do those calculations. I'm going to create a new table here and I'm just going to pick the basic table, like this. But I'm not going to need this Header Row here. So under Format Table I'm going to set the number of Header Rows to zero. I'm going to shrink this down and will call this Calculations. Then the first thing we want to have here isn't actually the calculation. It's the goal. So let's say the goal is $1000. Now let's do the calculation of the total so far. That's going to be a formula. I'm going to press the equals key to start typing a formula. I'm going to use SUM left parenthesis and then just click here at the header C for this entire column to be included and right parenthesis. Now I get the total there. 

Now I want to figure out how much is left and that's really simple. That's just a formula that is the goal, then minus the total so far. There we go. That's all we're going to need right here. So we can now create a chart that takes the total and the remainder and charts the two of them. Let's do it first in a pie chart because that's very simple. I'm going to click here for Chart. Choose a Pie Chart and then I'm going to click Add Chart Data. Now I don't want to add the goal. That's not part of it. That's the total of everything. I want to add the amount we've collected so far and the remainder. So I'm going to select just those two values right there. Now you can see here it shows me that that's 100%. That's because it is plotting each column as a series. I want to apply each row as a series. So by clicking on the colored dot there I can change to plot rows as a series and you can see I get the total and the remainder here. 

Now that looks pretty good but it doesn't really give us the aesthetic that we want to have a goal chart. To do that we're going to have to go to the Sidebar here. So with that selected, under Format, Chart what we're going to want to do is change each of these wedges to be something a little bit better. We're going to click on the wedge that represents the remainder and we want to make that kind of invisible. Let's first get rid of the Values right here. Then we are going to go to Style. We can simply change the color to white, if we like, or we could click on the color wheel here and select any color we want but set the opacity down to zero. 

However another way to do it that doesn't make the pie chart look odd is to change to be a lighter version of the same color. So we'll do a light blue for this wedge. For this wedge we'll do a dark blue. Now it looks like the pie is basically blue and we're filling in this section to make it darker. We could also go to Format, Wedge right here and we could decide whether or not we want the values to be shown what we want the values to look like. So instead of percentage we could have it Same As Source. Or we could say Currency and then let's take away the two decimal places like that. We could also change distance from center here to have this be more centered inside the wedge or have it be outside the wedge like that. 

Now we've got something that actually works pretty well. Let's go back to Chart here. Let's get rid of the legend. We don't need that. But we could certainly add a title if we wanted to or a caption. That might be nice. If we were to add another donation to this, like let's go down here and put another row in and say somebody gave $100. We can see how this automatically changes to fill in a little bit better. 

Now overshooting the goal could be kind of an issue. Like let's add another donation for $500 here. You can see it doesn't look right when we overshoot the goal. We get a negative value for this. So we could either take the total, the formula here, and surround that with a MIN function here where it's the minimum of the total or $1000 or actually we can just put a link to the goal there. So this number will never get higher than the goal. So it stays at $1000 even though this total here is above a 1000. 

Or we can go to the remainder here and we can set a maximum here for the remainder or zero. So it never goes below zero. That way you do get the right number in here. If you are relying on this number you get the right number there as well. But the chart will always look okay. 

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Now there's lots of variations for this. You can select each wedge and you can change the properties of the wedge and the style of each wedge. So you can really make this look like anything you want as long as it's just a pie chart. But what if we wanted something a little different. We could have also created a doughnut chart here. Since a pie chart and a doughnut chart are essentially the same thing we can actually select this pie chart here and under Format, Chart change it to be a doughnut, like that. W e could have just started with doughnut. So now that we've got a doughnut chart here there's some other things we may want to change about it. Like if we go to Format, Segments we might want to change the rotation angle so the chart starts at a different spot, like that or that. We also probably want to select the individual segments here and be a little more careful about the distance from center. Either having it right inside, like that, or to the right or left of it. 

But another thing you may want to do with a doughnut chart is actually not have it be a complete circle. We can add another row to this. I'll just call this Fill. I'm going to make the Fill also 1000 like that. Then I'm going to edit the data references to include that Fill value as well. So now the actual amount and the remainder only take up half the space. I can select this wedge here and I can set its style to white or zero percent opacity if I wanted to. Then I could select the entire chart here, go to Format, Segment and then change the rotation angle to 180 degrees. Now you're kind of filling up this curve here instead of a circle. Let's set for this wedge here, let's turn off the value so we don't see that 50% there. 

But now let's try a different type of chart. You may want to have this be kind of just a bar that fills up or a thermometer. So you can do that using a Stacked Column, which is this one right here. Select that and Add Chart Data. Then select the same two numbers here, the Total and the Remainder, like that. What you're going to get is two bars next to each other. But if you change so it plots rows as a series then it's going to put one bar on top of the other bar. So now we can select this part of the bar here and just like before we can change its style to white or to none. We could change this one as well. I like the idea of making this darker and making this one a lighter version of the color, like that. Let me go and select the entire chart here again. Let's go into Axis. For the Y axis let's just have one major step. So I just get the total right there. Let's turn off Show Minimum Value. Let's have the major guidelines turned off and then for the X value we'll turn off the axis line to get rid of that one there at the bottom. But it's also Category Label here set to None. Then even, if we want, we can just have the value labels turned off completely.  

So now this is just a bar, like that. Let's get rid of the legend there. So it is just a plain bar. We can shrink this, like that. Now you may want to have a border around this. If I turn on the Border you can see there's a gap on either end. But you've got that right here. Gaps between columns let's set that to zero. Now we've got a border around here. We can make it a little darker border. Now we don't even need to have this filled in if we don't want to. We can change the style for this to just be white like that. So now we've got a nice bar like this. Now you can see if we add or change one of these values, you know, it fills up just like the pie chart. 

Another nice look for this would be say to turn off the border. Let's go to this particular series here and set its style back to a light version of the color. Under chart you can turn on rounded corners, like this, and round the corners. You can even have outside corners like that. So it becomes more, kind of, a thermometer kind of graphic there. You also could change to a 3D stacked column, 3D stacked bar and yes, there are 3D pie charts as well. So 3D stacked column will make it look like this. Now you have a 3D graphic here. Let's go ahead and change the colors up a bit. You've got a nice shadow here. You've got lighting styles, all sorts of things that you could change to make this look even better. Even you can switch from bar shape to cylinder as well. You can move this around.

So lots of cool things you can do. As you can see there are tons of different settings. So if you really want to explore this, take the time to work with each setting to see what different results you can get. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.