MacMost Now 736: Numbers Pie Charts

Learn how to create pie charts in iWork Numbers. You can create beautiful 2D and 3D pie charts from a simple list of numbers. Find out how to break single wedges out of the chart and how to put the chart on a separate page for printing.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. In today's episode let's focus in on creating pie charts in Numbers.
Numbers has the ability to create really great looking pie charts. It is important to know how to use them and manipulate them.
So let's start with a blank numbers document here and say I want to create some sample data. Here I have some sample sales data that will make a nice pie chart.  I am going to shrink this table so it is exactly  the size I need right there and then in order to create a pie chart I am simply going to select the entire thing and I'm going to click on the Charts button here and jump to a pie chart.
This will bring up the inspector here and bring up the pie chart here in a separate area. It will also label everything. As long as I have the chart selected it will label all the different rows here with a different color so I can easily refer back and forth. 
One of the first things you may want to do is to change the colors here in this pie chart. I click on pie colors here in the inspector and then I can go to any one of these themes here. For instance I can go to a brown theme and I can Apply All and it is going to take this theme here and apply it. I can also say drag a specific color to an area. For instance, here if I wanted to drag purple into this slice I can do that. 
Then I have are a lot of different things here. For instance 3-D texture fills I can apply that to it. See it applies there. There's is a lot of different themes to choose from. You can drag and drop to arrange things as you want.
I have a lot of other options here in the inspector. I can show and hide the title of the chart. If I have it shown I can select it and I can name it like that. I can show or hide the legend. The legend here appears underneath (I'll scroll up a bit) and you can see it right there. When it is shown I can actually select it and move it somewhere else. Even resize it like that if I want. I can also show labels or not there. I can show the series name like that. I have adjustments here. I can show if I'm going to have the labels show decimal places or not and different format options for that. So let's put it simply like that. 
I have the explosion feature where I can explode the chart like that to bring it apart which creates a great visual effect. The cool thing is you can do that with the entire chart. I can also go and select one piece and explode just that one piece of the pie out like that. 
I have the ability for the entire thing to rotate it. So if I can get something I want to feature at a certain angle I can do that. I can add a shadow for the entire group or for individuals so an individual makes more sense if you are exploding the entire thing.
Now this chart looks pretty cool but what is even cooler is if you do a 3D chart. So I'm going to switch the chart type and it gives me this 3D pie chart here. I can now manipulate it using this little control that comes up. It also comes up in the inspector here. You can see it at the bottom. So I can manipulate the angle in two different axis like that. Now I have the ability with 3D chart as well to change the depth and to double the edges so it creates more definition between everything. I still have the ability to do all the other stuff here like exploding the pieces if I want.
Now to have a really cool looking table you may want to print it out but you may not want to have this data here with it. So one of the things you can do is to create a new sheet. We will create this completely new sheet here and then you can delete this table from it so it is a blank sheet. You can go into this pie chart  here and move it by simply dragging to the second sheet here. I'll try it again. There you go. So now I have got sheet 1 which has the data in it and sheet 2 has the pie chart. So now I can position this on a page and print it without having the spreadsheet on it as well. 
So there is a quick look at pie charts in Numbers. It is a very versatile visual form for Numbers. A lot of different things you can do with it. I encourage you to play around with it.
I hope you found this useful. This is Gary with MacMost Now.

Comments: 7 Responses to “MacMost Now 736: Numbers Pie Charts”

Joe

12 years ago

Hi Gary,

Great tutorials but i really miss some of the ipad numbers, how to work with pie charts and how to edit data, colors etc. like in mac.

Thanks for considering
Joe ( Switzerland)

Marc

Hi Gary... Is there a way to turn off the default drop shadow on the value label number in pie charts? Thanks!
Marc

Gary Rosenzweig

Not sure. I don't see a setting.

Leon

Creating a pie chart or using the supplied "stock" format is not a problem. My question is how do I update the chart's legend with a new entry and new color choice?

Select the chart and use the Inspector to change which cells it represents.

Thank you the quick response. I have tried selecting the chart itself, when I do this the box containing "Account Categories becomes highlighted showing its entries & the color it represents in the chart. Any attempts to ADD a new category has been futile. Inspector works as you stated, but that's not what I need. How do I "add" a new entry into the category table AND give it a differtn color representation? Thanks

Try this. Double-click on the chart. It should also highlight the cells in the table that are being used in the chart. You can grab the bottom right corner of that area and expand it, adding more rows.

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MacMost Now 736: Numbers Pie Charts

Comments: 7 Responses to “MacMost Now 736: Numbers Pie Charts”

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