You can choose in the Chart Wizard to explode the pie chart, but this is an all or nothing option. When you do this you might need to enlarge the chart area again to regain the original size of the pieces. If your aim is to accentuate one piece of the pie, you can separate out one piece by carefully highlighting it after you have finished with the Chart Wizard, and dragging it out of the pie plate. Just don’t clutter it so much that your message is lost, and be careful that tilting does not distort the relative size of the segments. It can then be tilted, given shadows, and generally turned into a work of art. You can do some interesting things with a pie chart, especially if you make it into a 3D chart.

They work best with smaller numbers of values, about half a dozen more than this and the visual impact begins to fade.Īs the Chart Wizard guesses the series that you wish to include in your pie chart, you might need to adjust this initially on the Wizard’s Data Ranges page if you know you want a pie chart, or by using the Format > Data Ranges > Data Series dialog. For example, comparisons of departmental spending: what the department spent on different items or what different departments spent. Pie charts are excellent when you need to compare proportions. We also changed the colors to a hatch pattern.

The third chart is an attempt to get rid of the legend and put labels showing the names of the companies on the axis instead.

The second chart is the 3D option in the chart wizard with a simple border and the 3D chart area twisted around.

The first chart is achieved quite simply by using the chart wizard with Insert > Grids, deselecting y-axis, and using Insert > Mean Value Lines.

Bar charts are excellent for giving an immediate visual impact for data comparison where time is not important, for example to compare the popularity of a few products in a marketplace.

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