Pie Chart Maker

Build your pie chart

How to make a pie chart

1. Put one row per category in the table: the label on the left, the value on the right. The generator computes each share for you — do not enter percentages that you have already worked out unless they add to 100.
2. Keep one series. A pie shows a single whole; if you add a second column the chart uses the first one and tells you so.
3. Sort from largest to smallest, starting at twelve o'clock. A reader compares adjacent slices far more accurately than scattered ones.
4. Choose Pie for a plain part-to-whole split, or Donut when you want the total or the headline share printed in the hole.
5. Download SVG or PNG. The legend and the percentage labels are part of the file, so the chart still reads without the page around it.

When a pie chart works — and when it does not

A pie chart answers exactly one question: what share of the total does each part take? It answers it well when there are few parts, the parts really do sum to a meaningful whole, and the differences between them are large enough to see.

• Good: two to five categories, one obviously dominant slice, a whole that genuinely adds to 100% — traffic by channel, revenue by region, budget split.
• Bad: values that do not sum to a whole, such as survey questions where people picked more than one answer.
• Bad: eight or more slices. Everything below about 5% turns into an unreadable sliver with a leader line.
• Bad: comparing two pies side by side to show change. Angles are hard to compare across charts — use grouped bars or a line chart instead.
• Bad: any trend over time. Time is a sequence, not a composition.

Pie vs. donut vs. bar

A donut is a pie with the middle removed. It reads slightly less precisely than a pie because the slices lose their common centre point, but the hole buys you a place to print the total, which usually earns its keep in a dashboard tile.

When slices are close in size, a horizontal bar chart beats both. Humans compare lengths along a shared baseline far more accurately than angles — 31% against 28% is obvious as two bars and nearly invisible as two slices. This page lets you flip the same data to horizontal bars in one click, so you can see the difference for yourself before you decide.

Labelling that survives a screenshot

• Print the percentage, not just the raw value — the whole point of the chart is the share.
• State the total somewhere. "Share of 1,284 orders" turns a decorative chart into a piece of evidence.
• Group the long tail into a single "Other" slice and say in the caption what is in it.
• Keep colours stable across a deck. If "Direct" is blue on slide 4, it should not be orange on slide 9.

Frequently asked questions

More ToCharts tools