

The Format Legend pane will open up on right side of the Excel where you can legend colors, effects, position and text designs. To format the legend of a pie chart, right-click on the legend and click ‘Format Legend’. Right now, the example chart has population value as labels, but we can change that to percentage.Īnd the Populations numbers will be changed to percentage. You can even set what your data label should contain. Here, you can change data label sizes, alignment, colors, effects, and label texts. Right-click anywhere on the data series and click ‘Format Data Labels’. Click on the ‘Chart Elements’ icon, then click ‘Legend’ and select where you want your chart legend to appear in the chart. You can change the location of chart legends and chart title in the pie chart. You can also add data labels and other chart elements from the ‘Add Chart Elements’ option in the ‘Design’ tab. Then click ‘Data Labels’ and select what kind of data label you want. You can add chart elements, change chart style and edit chart filters using the three icons that appear beside the chart or by using the Design tab in Excel.Ĭlick on the floating plus icon (Chart Elements) beside the chart to add data labels.

Let’s see how you can customize your pie chart and make it more attractive.

Once you created a pie chart, you can modify/format almost every part of the pie chart. The result will look like this: Customizing/Formatting a Pie Chart in Excel We’re choosing a 2-D pie chart for our example. When you hover your cursor over a chart type, you can read a description of the chart and you can also see the preview of the chart. Then go to the ‘Insert’ tab, and click on the ‘Pie Chart’ icon in the Charts group.Ĭhoose your pie chart type in the drop-down. Once you created a data set, select the entire data set. The table should be in a basic format with the first column containing the labels and the second column containing the values.įor example, we are going to create a pie chart that represents the big cat population in the wild (see below). To make a pie chart, first, you must set up your data in a basic table. In this article, we’ll give you step-by-step instructions for creating and customizing a pie chart in Microsoft’s Excel. Column charts are used for comparing data across categories and line charts are used for showing trends in a data series over time while pie charts are mainly used for showing the relative shares of categories in a total.

Unlike line graphs or bar charts, we can only use a single data series in a pie chart. And each slice (portions) represents a percentage of the overall total amount. Pie charts are a type of circular graph, which is divided into slices (portions). Pie charts are one of the most widely used charts used for data visualization because they are easy to read and understand. Learn everything about creating and formatting a Pie chart in Excel.
