Charts

Pie Chart Generator

A pie or donut chart with percentages worked out and the long tail folded into one slice.

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How to use this tool

  1. Paste your labels and values. They do not need to add up to 100 — each share is worked out from the total.
  2. Set the fold threshold. Two percent keeps the tail readable on most datasets; set it to 0 to draw every slice.
  3. Select Draw the pie chart.
  4. Ask whether the parts genuinely make a whole. If they do not, the bar chart next door is the honest version of the same picture.

What pie chart generator does

A pie chart makes one claim: these parts add up to a whole. When that is true and there are two or three slices, it reads instantly. When it is not true, or there are eleven slices, it is a worse bar chart with a stronger implication attached — which is why the criticism of pie charts is really a criticism of using them for data that was never a whole.

Paste labels and values and this draws a pie or a donut, sorted largest first, with each share worked out as a percentage. Slices below a threshold you set are folded into one so the tail does not become a fringe of unreadable slivers. Negative values are refused rather than drawn, because a slice cannot be less than nothing.

Frequently asked questions

Because a slice is a share of a whole and there is no way for a share to be less than nothing. If your data crosses zero — profit and loss, change against last year — it is not a whole being divided, and a bar chart is the chart that can show it honestly.

It makes little practical difference to how the chart is read; both are judged by angle and area. The donut buys you the middle, which is a genuinely useful place to put the total, and it slightly reduces the temptation to compare slices by their pointed ends. Pick either and stay consistent across a deck.

Because slices under a couple of percent are thinner than their own labels, and a ring of unreadable slivers makes the chart look busier without conveying anything. Folding them into one keeps the total honest while leaving the picture legible. Set the threshold to 0 if you would rather see every one.

No — each share is calculated as a proportion of whatever the values total, so raw counts work as well as percentages. The thing worth checking is not the arithmetic but the premise: if the categories overlap, or if some of the data is missing from the list, the pie is claiming a completeness it does not have.