Creating Pie Charts From Lists Of Data In Mac Numbers

Hi this is Gary from MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to create pie charts in Numbers using a list of data.

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So usually creating pie charts in Numbers is pretty straight forward. But if you have a list of data it's a little more difficult. Creating pie charts in Numbers is really easy if you have a nice table that looks like this. It just has values here on the left and then a total on the right for each value. You can then select the entire thing. Click on Chart and then select Pie Chart and then you have this nice pie chart that shows a wedge for each of the values here.  But we're not always that lucky to have a nice tables like that. Sometimes we have data that looks like this.

This is a table with records, in this case orders, and you have a name, which we don't really care about. Then which pie was ordered. So we want to now count these and create a pie chart that has a wedge for blueberry, and another one for pumpkin, apple, coconut cream, etc. The problem is you just can't do that. You select this table here and Chart and then Pie. You're not going to get anything that gives you a pie chart because you don't have values here. It needs numbers to work with that. So how can you get numbers from this. Well, there's a hard way and an easy way. The hard way has been around forever. But the easy was is fairly new. Let's look at the hard way first because it's still a little more versatile.

So what we need to do is create another table. I'm going to create a table here and this is going to be called Pie Orders and we'll put the Pie here and we'll put the number here. Then we can shrink this all down. Now we actually have to put a value here for every kind of pie represented. So we'll do blueberry, pumpkin. I'm just going to copy and paste. Make sure I get each one represented once. After I've got all of that done now I can put a formula here to count the number of occurrences. So I can do equals to enter the formula mode and then COUNTIF and then I can select Column B from this table and try to match that to the cell to the left here. So in this case it would be blueberry. Hit Return and I can see there are ten blueberry pies there. I can Copy and Paste this and it will still be using Column B here but it's going to be using whatever is represented on the left there. In this case a 3. In this case it would be a 4. So it's always going to match. This is how many apples. This is how many coconut cream, etc.

Now I have table that looks a lot like we had before. I can select this entire table. Do Chart. Do Pie and I get my pie chart counting everything that's here. It will even update. So if I change one of these, for instance, I can then see those numbers change and this will change as well. But there's a way to do this without having this secondary table here. You can just do it directly from this table. That's by using Categories. So let's get rid of that.

I'm going to go to this table here and I want to organize this table by category. Category from Column B. I can do that several ways. One is I can click here and then choose Add Category for Pie. I could also go to Organize and then Add Category for Pie. I could go over to the Organize sidebar over here and Add Category for Pie. There's a lot of different ways I can do it. Whichever way you're going to do it you're going to end up with the same thing. Add Category for Pie. 

Now it's going to group these all together by the type of pie. So you can see they're all grouped. Now I still don't have the count of how many are in each one. I can see here how many there are but I don't have that number. But these special Category rows here. You can see there's Row 1 and Row 2. What's this one? This is a special category row here. When I go to one of the cells here I get this little Settings button. I can click that and I could say what goes in that cell. In this case I have nothing. No summary there. But I can do things like an average or a minimum value. Things like that. Or I can choose Count. If I select that now you can see it says Pie and Count and I get the number there. 10, 10, 7, etc.

So now that I've got that setup you can select the entire table again and go to Chart and go to Pie and sure enough it picks up these counts here and the category name for each one and creates exactly the pie chart that we wanted.  We didn't have to create another table to do it.

Now if you want these sorted then what you would do is before you create that pie chart here go to Organize and you can see it says Sort Groups. I can say I want to Sort By pie value ascending.  Now you see all the apple pies are together. All the blueberry pies. Everything is in alphabetical order so when I go to create the chart it will create it and you can see they're in alphabetical order here and as they go around the pie as well.