A pie chart allows you to see which company or person has the biggest piece of the pie, with the pie representing either the market or the share of assets. Here’s how you can make your own Google Sheets pie chart.
A pie chart is one of the most visually impactful ways to present data. The human mind can’t really grasp what 20 percent or 30 percent really covers until they can see the abstract notions on even quantified data in something like a pie chart.
With that said, did you know you can make pie charts with your Google Sheets data? Let’s learn how to make a pie chart in google sheets!
Why Make a Pie Chart in Google Sheets?
As mentioned above, your customers, your clients, you bosses, and even yourself might have a difficult time grasping the significance of numbers until you can show how much a percentage of this or that truly is.
You can use a pie chart to illustrate a company’s market share, for example. The chart is also useful in determining your most productive month in a year based on the sales you’ve made, the revenue you’ve generated, the commissions you’ve made, and so forth.
A pie chart also shows in no uncertain terms who’s the market leader or who leads the pack in the industry based on their percentage of the industry market share.
Regardless, let’s now move on from the whys to the hows of creating Google Sheets pie charts!
How to Make a Pie Chart in Google Sheets
Step 1: Open a spreadsheet with data you can put into a pie chart like so.
Step 2: Select all pertinent data you want to chart out then go to the “Insert” menu to access the “Chart” feature.
You can also click on the “Insert Chart” button on the shortcut bar on Google Sheets to accomplish the same thing.
Step 3: Here, we can see the data plotted out in the bar graph. Although we’re now supposed to edit the bar graph and turn it into a pie chart, the data in it is a bit too repetitive to be of use for a pie chart.
Therefore, let’s select a more varied and diverse data set that would look better on a pie chart. In the case of my invoice, I selected the sum of money I’ve made every month instead of the individual articles.
This has resulted in a colorful graph spanning from April 2019 to December 2019. The earlier chart only alternates between articles with the price of $100 and $75.
Step 4: Go to the “Setup” tab at the top of the “Chart editor” sidebar. Now click on the drop-down box for “Chart type“. Pick the pie chart option.
Step 5: After some finagling and editing—I’ve put the data on a separate table because I realized my payments for November and December 2019 are split as every two weeks instead of every month—we now have a clearer view of my article-writing performance for 2019.
Thusly, we can derive the following information from the chart.
- As expected, November was my most-productive month (30 percent of my total earnings for 2019 was in November), followed by December (22.3 percent right after November).
- I had lower productivity from April to October, with my lowest at May 2019 (4.5 percent of my 2019 earnings) because I’ve just been hired and I was learning the ropes.
- I’ve gotten the hang of the job gradually, from 4 percent to 6 percent to 7 percent by the time July to October rolled in, with October nearing 8 percent and serving as my third most productive month.
Step 6: You can also choose other chart types under the pie chart option. I’ve chosen the 2D pie chart, but there are other types such as the doughnut chart.
And here it’s the 3D pie chart or a more three-dimensional version of the same chart and data.
Did you know that if you had the doughnut chart selected instead of the pie chart before shifting to the 3D chart, you can get a 3D doughnut chart instead?
Finally, you have the option to edit the chart in any way, shape, or form you wish on the custom editor. Just click the “Customize/Customise” tab and edit the appearance of the chart from there.
If you wish to edit the info on the chart, you need to do so with the table you used or the columns you’ve selected instead of the chart itself.
To Sum Up
To sum up how to make a pie chart, get comparable data from a relatively simple two-column type of table. From there, go to the “Insert” menu and select “Chart” or go to the “Insert Chart” icon on the shortcut bar of Google Sheets.
The presented data will either default to a bar graph or a line graph. Select “Edit chart” or go to the already open “Chart editor” sidebar in order to access the drop-down “Chart type” menu and select the pie chart type you wish to use.
References:
- Vertex42, “Creating a Pie Chart in Google Sheets“, YouTube, August 15, 2017
- Google Workspace, “Create a pie chart in Google Sheets“, YouTube, December 21 2019
- Spreadsheet Point, “How to Make a Pie Chart in Google Sheets“, YouTube, August 12, 2021
- Sandy Writtenhouse, “How to Make a Pie Chart in Google Sheets“, HowtoGeek.com, November 16, 2021