Pie Charts

Pie charts work best when they contain a relatively small number of segments and when the segments represent a complete data set. Producing a pie chart for the population of the twelve countries seen in the column chart page would not be appropriate because:

• There are twelve countries, which may be too many
• The data range is wide so India would take by far the biggest share while Denmark and Israel would be practically invisible and indistinguishable
• The twelve countries do not make up the world's population as a whole.

Here is a pie chart based on these data so you can see it is not appropriate:

A better data source for a pie chart would be the population of the six continents:

Run Excel. This spreadsheet can be found here: K:\IT\FourthForm\population_by_continent_2000.xls.

Make a pie chart from the six labels and numbers (not the total - what would happen if you were to include this?)

Again, step three of the wizard is the key point, where the Titles are added, the legend can be removed (retained here) and Data Labels can be added.

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