If you want to explore the strategy in more detail, watch the video or download the template.How To Make A Pie Chart In Excel Based On Cell Color.

The total segment has a transparent fill so it looks invisible. It’s also a ton of work to crunch the numbers, create text boxes, and center them perfectly above each bar. This is a stacked bar chart with three segments: males, females, and totals. No, I didn’t add the totals to each quarter’s bar chart with text boxes. Here’s the after version for a handout or report, which intentionally contains a bit more explanatory text. Here’s the after version for a slideshow:įor a Report: Stacked Columns with a Subtitle For a Slideshow: Stacked Columns with a Short Title Fewer than 100 youth went to these detention centers each quarter, so we displayed numbers. My rule of thumb is to display numbers for anything less than 100 and percentages for anything over 100. Stacked bars can display the number of males, females, and the totals. They’re also easy to label (compared to, say, a stacked area chart). We used vertical bars because time is ordinal. I’m tired just thinking about it.Īfter we sketched ideas and discussed the pros and cons of each approach, we decided that stacked bars with numbers were the most promising. Your eyes would have to jump from the 1st quarter pie to the 2nd quarter pie to the 3rd quarter pie to the 4th quarter pie and back again. According to my pie chart guidelines, gender breakdowns are one of the only times it’s okay to use a pie chart (nominal variable, just a few slices, etc.).īut it’s really hard to make comparisons across multiple pies. The quarter-by-quarter pies are off the table. I adjusted the wording from youth going to detention centers to youth being served so that this example is relevant to even more of you. Naturally, the quarter-by-quarter-no-way-these-don’t-work-pies were currently being used by a few people in the room.

and probably a few more that I haven’t thought of yet.

small multiples line graphs with numbers.

quarter-by-quarter pies (well, not the best choice).

There are a dozen ways to graph each dataset.

how many youth went to juvenile detention centers,.

Wondering whether pie charts are okay? Ready to move beyond pie charts, but not sure what to use instead?Ī few weeks ago I was in Indianapolis with the juvenile detention alternatives initiative.

How to create pie chart in excel on m