What to do with hard to view data points on a pie chart

Pie charts are great for data that is arranged in one column. Pie charts show the size of items, proportional to the sum of the items. The data points in a pie chart are percentages of the whole pie. But what do you do when some of your values are so small that they display as slivers of the pie (see following image)? It’s really difficult to evaluate kumquats, kiwis, and cherries in this traditional pie.

A bar of pie charts displays pie charts with smaller values extracted from the main pie chart and combined into a stacked bar chart. This chart is useful when you want to make small slices in the main pie chart easier to distinguish. Before you create the chart, sort your data in descending order to push the smaller values to the bottom of the column.

Then change the chart type to Bar of Pie. Now one data point (or slice of the pie) represents your three smallest values. Not only is it easier to view your smaller values, you can effectively evaluate their performance in relation to their data point on the pie.

The great thing is that you can easily modify the properties of this secondary plot (or slice of the pie) that represents the bar. Select the plot point and modify its properties. In the following image, I’ve increased the plot point to include the bottom four values.

In the final example, I wanted the fruit arranged alphabetically by name, but sorting on name changes the order of the sales values. Again I modify the properties of this secondary plot to contain all values less than a certain percentage value, in this case 12%. As you can see, my legend shows the fruit in alphabetical order and the secondary bar still has only the lowest 4 values.

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