How to Create a Donut Chart in Excel with AI

Creating a donut chart in Excel is a great way to show how individual parts contribute to a whole, but clicking through menus to get it just right can feel tedious. This guide will walk you through the traditional step-by-step clicks for making a donut chart. We'll also cover how modern AI tools are making the entire process easier and faster than ever.

What is a Donut Chart and When Should You Use It?

Think of a donut chart as a pie chart with the center cut out. That hole in the middle isn't just for looks, it provides a perfect space to display a key takeaway, like the total value or a headline metric.

These charts are best for showing proportional data, or "part-to-whole" relationships. They make it easy to see, at a glance, what the biggest or smallest contributors are to a single category.

Here are a few common scenarios where a donut chart works perfectly:

Marketing Analytics: Visualizing the percentage of website traffic from different sources (e.g., Organic Search, Social Media, Direct, Referral).
Sales Reporting: Breaking down total revenue by product category or sales region.
Budget Tracking: Showing how expenses are allocated across different departments.
Project Management: Displaying the percentage of tasks completed, in progress, or not started.

Best Practices for Donut Charts

To keep your donut chart clear and effective, follow a few simple guidelines:

Keep it Simple: Donut charts work best with a small number of categories - ideally six or fewer. Too many slices make it cluttered and difficult to read.
One Dataset at a Time: A single donut chart should represent one set of data. Don't try to compare two different datasets in the same chart, a bar chart is better for that.
Use the Center Space: The hole is your prime real estate. Use a textbox to add your total figure or the main KPI the chart represents. This provides immediate context.
Clear Labeling: Label your slices directly with category names and percentages or values. This often makes a separate legend unnecessary, saving space and making the chart easier to interpret.

How to Create a Donut Chart in Excel (The Traditional Way)

Building a donut chart in Excel is a straightforward process. Let's walk through it with a simple example: an online store's sales breakdown by product category.

Step 1: Set Up Your Data

First, prepare your data in two simple columns. One column should list your categories, and the adjacent column should contain the corresponding numerical values. Your data should not have empty rows or columns separating it.

Here’s our sample data:

Column A: Category (e.g., Electronics, Apparel, Home Goods, Books)
Column B: Sales (e.g., $15,000, $8,500, $12,000, $4,500)

Step 2: Insert the Donut Chart

With your data correctly formatted, inserting the chart takes just a few clicks:

Select the range of data you want to include in the chart. In our example, that would be cells A1 through B5.
Navigate to the Insert tab on the Excel ribbon.
In the Charts section, click on the icon that looks like a pie chart ("Insert Pie or Doughnut Chart").
From the dropdown menu, select the Doughnut chart option.

Excel will instantly generate a basic donut chart on your worksheet. It will look pretty plain at first, but now comes the important part: making it clear and professional.

Step 3: Customize and Format Your Donut Chart

A default chart rarely tells the full story. Let's add titles, labels, and polish the design.

Add a Clear Chart Title

Excel will likely give you a generic title like "Sales." Double-click the chart title to edit it. Make it descriptive and concise, for example, "Total Sales by Product Category."

Add Data Labels

Labels are essential for making your chart understandable without requiring readers to consult a legend.

Click on your chart to select it.
Click the plus sign (+) icon (Chart Elements) that appears on the top-right corner of the chart.
Check the box next to Data Labels.
For more options, click the small arrow next to Data Labels and select More Options.... This opens a new panel where you can choose to show the Category Name, Value, and/or Percentage. Showing the Category Name and Percentage is often the cleanest option.

Customize Colors and Donut Hole Size

To stand out and align with your branding, change the default blue/orange colors.

Right-click on one of the donut slices and select Format Data Series....
Here, you can modify the Doughnut Hole Size. A value between 60% and 75% usually looks good.
To change the colors, select a single slice, and in the same "Format Data Point" panel, click the paint can icon ("Fill & Line"). Choose a new fill color. Repeat for each slice.

Putting a Key Metric in the Center

This is an advanced but valuable tip. To add the total sales figure in the center of your donut, you'll need to insert a text box.

Go to the Insert tab.
Click on Text Box and draw a small box in the center of your donut chart.
Click inside the text box. Now, go to the formula bar, type =, and click the cell that contains your total sales value (you might need to add a SUM formula in a cell first, like =SUM(B2:B5)). Press Enter.
Now the text box is dynamically linked to your total. If your data changes, the total in the center of the donut will update automatically.
Finally, format the text in the box (center alignment, increase font size, etc.) and set the text box fill to "No Fill" and outline to "No Outline."

After these steps, your polished donut chart should be ready to share.

The Hurdles of Manual Chart Creation in Excel

The manual process works, but it isn't always efficient, especially when you think about daily or weekly reporting. The "quick" task of creating a chart can quickly become a time sink due to common frustrations:

It's Repetitive: If you need to create the same report every week, you're repeating all those formatting clicks every single time.
Formatting is Fussy: Aligning labels, resizing elements, and getting colors just right involves a lot of trial and error clicking around in formatting panels.
Error-Prone: Accidentally selected the wrong data range? You often have to start over or get into a frustrating loop of trying to fix the chart's source data.
The Follow-up Question Problem: The moment someone asks, "Looks great, but can we see this same chart without the 'Books' category?" you have to go back, adjust your data, and likely re-format the entire chart again.

This traditional method assumes you already know exactly what you want to visualize. But data analysis is often an exploratory process, and the manual method in Excel doesn't make that exploration very easy.

Enter AI: A Smarter Way to Create Donut Charts

This is where AI-powered data analytics tools change the game. Instead of navigating menus, you simply describe the chart you want in plain English. Excel is developing its own features like Copilot, and other tools specialize in this conversational approach to data.

Instead of the multi-step manual process, your workflow becomes this:

Connect your data source.
Write a prompt: Type something like, "Create a donut chart showing the sales breakdown by product category."

The AI handles the entire process for you - selecting the data, creating the chart, adding appropriate labels, and applying clean formatting in an instant. Then you can follow up with more natural language prompts, "change the title to 'Q1 Performance'" or "show percentages instead of values," which makes creating your perfect chart incredibly fast.

Traditional vs. AI Chart Building

Let's break down the difference:

The Clicks: Traditionally, you're looking at 10 to 30 clicks to create and polish a single donut chart. With AI, it's one prompt.
The Learning Curve: The old way requires learning Excel's interface - the ribbons, the menus, the formatting panels. The new way just requires you to ask a question. This opens up data visualization to anyone on your team, not just spreadsheet experts.
The Iteration Speed: Experimenting in Excel is slow. With AI, you can ask follow-up questions and generate variations of your chart in seconds. You are able to explore your data at the speed of thought.

Final Thoughts

Building a donut chart in Excel manually is a fundamental skill, but it’s a process filled with repetitive clicks and formatting. Understanding these steps is valuable, but for regular reporting and quick analysis, that manual process can slow you down.

Eliminating this tedious, manual work is a large part of why we built Graphed. Many teams spend hours every week downloading CSVs from different platforms like Google Analytics, Shopify, or Salesforce, just to stitch the data together and build a few charts in Excel. We allow you to securely connect those data sources, ask questions in plain English - like "create a donut chart showing sessions by marketing source from Google Analytics" - and get a live, interactive dashboard instantly. It automates away the grunt work so you can go from data to insight in seconds, not hours.