Pie charts

Pie and Donut Charts are mostly created to show the contributions of different values to a total amount. They are easy to read on charts. Donut charts work best to compare a particular section to the whole rather than comparing individual sections with each other though both show a relation of part to whole.

When to use pie charts

  • Whenever the user needs to show approximate values in relation to other values.
  • Mostly used in business and statistics. It’s good for showing the relationship between individual proportions to the whole data.
  • It’s simply used for visualizing the percentage of the part to the whole total unit.
  • Pie charts are commonly used in business presentations like sales, operations, survey results, resources, etc as they provide a quick summary.

Common examples

1. Total sales amount split by item (percentage contribution of each item)

2. Total sales amount split by brands of different items.

Features of the pie chart

  • Drill down for details by double-clicking a slice.
  • Pie charts can have sub-slices within a larger pie chart or slice.
  • You can cross filter a chart with another chart. Suppose you click any bar or column in a chart, that particular area of pie chart will get highlighted and rest of the pie is grayed or faded.

Let us start understanding and creating those charts in a very simple way.

Pre-requisite: You can refer to Power BI interactive dashboards for easy implementation of the following charts.

Power BI – Create Pie and Donut Charts

In this article, we will learn to create Pie and Donut Charts using Power BI.

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Pie charts

Pie and Donut Charts are mostly created to show the contributions of different values to a total amount. They are easy to read on charts. Donut charts work best to compare a particular section to the whole rather than comparing individual sections with each other though both show a relation of part to whole....

Difference between Pie and Donut charts

Similar to a pie chart, a doughnut chart also shows the relationship of parts to a whole, but a doughnut chart can contain multiple data series unlike pie charts Each data series in a doughnut chart adds a ring to the chart. The center may hold the first data series. Donut charts have a better visual appeal and data intensity ratio....

Types of Pie charts

There are so many different types of Pie and Donut charts. Some of them are as follows, We will will implementing a very few basic pie and donut charts using Power BI to get the basic hang of its implementations using the tool....

Dataset

The dataset used is “SalesData.xlsx“. Upload the dataset in Power BI and refer to the dataset to follow along with the below-given sections of the article....

Pie Chart in Power BI

Drag the Pie chart icon from the “Visualizations” pane to the Report view Canvas of Power BI desktop. The initial pie chart in the canvas looks like the following....

Donut Charts

Donut charts are very similar to pie charts other than the data displayed in rings , where the ring represents a data series....

Types of Donut charts

Some Donut chart examples are given below...

Example

The similar steps of pie chart to be followed for the implementation with little change. Initially drag the donut chart icon from the “Visualizations” pane to report pane....

Limitations

Due to circular nature, doughnut charts are not easy to read, especially when they display multiple data series. Avoid small slices out of so many categories which is difficult to read analyze. Data points on outer rings may appear larger than data points on inner rings while their actual values may be smaller. Displaying values or percentages in data labels is very useful in a doughnut chart, but if you want to compare the data points side by side, you should use a stacked column or stacked bar chart instead....