How to Create a Donut Chart in Power BI with AI

Creating a donut chart in Power BI doesn't have to be a multi-step process. While the traditional drag-and-drop method works just fine, you can build the exact same visual in a matter of seconds by simply asking Power BI's AI for it in plain English. This guide will walk you through both the manual process and the faster, AI-powered way to add effective donut charts to your reports.

What Exactly is a Donut Chart?

A donut chart is really just a pie chart with a hole in the middle. Like its filled-in cousin, its primary job is to show how different parts make up a whole. Each "slice" represents a category, and the size of that slice is proportional to its value compared to the total. Think of it for visualizing things like:

Market share percentages for different competitors.
Breakdown of a marketing budget by channel.
Sales revenue distribution across different product categories.
Percentage of website traffic from various countries.

The empty space in the center isn't just for looks, it's a practical spot to place a key performance indicator (KPI), like the total value of all the slices combined. This can make the chart more informative at a glance, giving the viewer both the breakdown and the grand total in one compact visual.

However, donut charts share a key weakness with pie charts: they can become difficult to read when you include too many categories. The human eye struggles to accurately compare the size of angled slices, especially when their values are close. As a general rule, if you have more than 5-7 categories, a bar or column chart is often a clearer choice for comparing values.

Method 1: The Manual Approach to Building a Donut Chart

The classic way to create any visual in Power BI is by using the Visualizations and Fields panes. It's a reliable method that gives you full control over every step of the process. Let's build a donut chart showing sales by product category.

Step 1: Get Your Data Ready

Before you build anything, you need to have your data loaded into your Power BI model. For a donut chart, you need at least two things:

A categorical field (text-based) to define the slices. Examples: Product Category, Sales Region, Marketing Channel.
A numerical field (number-based) to determine the size of those slices. Examples: Sales Amount, Number of Clicks, Total Units Sold.

Once your data is loaded and ready, you can move on to the report canvas.

Step 2: Select the Donut Chart Visual

On the right side of your Power BI report screen, you'll find the Visualizations pane. It’s a grid of icons representing all the different charts and visuals you can create. Find the icon for the donut chart and click it. An empty template for your chart will appear on the report canvas.

Tip: If you click the icon without having anything selected on the canvas, a new, blank visual will be created. If you have an existing visual selected, clicking the icon will transform that visual into a donut chart.

Step 3: Assign Your Data Fields

With the new, empty donut chart selected, look back at the Visualizations pane. Below the icons, you'll see fields where you can drag and drop your data. For a donut chart, the two most important ones are:

Legend: This is for your categorical data. Drag the field that defines your slices here. For our example, we would drag Product Category into this box.
Values: This is for your numerical data. Drag the field that determines the size of each slice here. In our case, we'd drag Sales Amount into this box.

As soon as you drop both fields into the correct spots, Power BI will instantly render the donut chart on your canvas. It will automatically calculate the sums and percentages for you.

Step 4: Format and Customize Your Chart

Now that you have a functioning chart, it's time to refine its appearance. With the visual selected, click the paintbrush icon (Format your visual) in the Visualizations pane. This opens up a menu of formatting options. Here are a few you'll commonly use:

Legend: Change the position, text style, and font of the legend.
Slices: Manually change the color of each slice to match your brand or highlight a specific category.
Spacing: Adjust the Inner radius slider to make the donut's hole larger or smaller.
Detail labels: This is a crucial one. You can choose what information appears on a label for each slice. Popular options include showing the Category name and the Percentage of total, or just the data value itself.
General > Title: Always give your chart a clear, descriptive title. Edit the text, font, size, and alignment here.

Method 2: The AI-Powered Method with Power BI Q&A

The manual method is great, but it involves a lot of clicking and dragging. Power BI has a built-in AI feature called "Q&A" (Questions & Answers) that lets you create visuals just by typing what you want in natural language. It’s incredibly fast and feels much more intuitive once you get the hang of it.

Step 1: Access the Q&A Feature

You can add a Q&A visual to your report in a couple of ways:

Find the Q&A icon in the Visualizations pane and click it.
Alternatively, just double-click on any empty part of your report canvas. Power BI will automatically create a Q&A box ready for your query.

Step 2: Ask Your Question in Plain English

This is where the magic happens. In the Q&A box, simply type what you want to see. The key is to use the names of your data columns in your question. To recreate the same chart from the manual example, you could type:

Show total sales amount by product category as a donut chart

Power BI's AI will parse your sentence, identify the fields (Sales Amount, Product Category), understand the aggregation (total sum), and recognize the chart type you want (donut chart). It will generate the visual instantly as you type.

Here are a few more examples of prompts you could use:

"Website sessions by country as a donut"
"What is the profit breakdown by region in a donut chart?"
"donut of units sold per salesperson"

The more specific you are, the better the result. If you just type "sales by region," Power BI might create a map or a bar chart by default. Adding "...as a donut chart" at the end ensures you get precisely what you want without any extra clicks.

Step 3: Convert the Q&A Result into a Standard Visual

The visual created by Q&A is dynamic and lives inside the Q&A element. To make it a permanent, standard part of your report, you need to convert it. To do this, click the icon in the top-right corner of the Q&A box that looks like a tiny bar chart with a checkmark hovering over it. Its tooltip will read, "Turn this Q&A result into a standard visual."

Once you click it, the Q&A box disappears, and you're left with a regular donut chart visual on your canvas. From this point on, it’s identical to the one you created manually. You can format it using the same paintbrush menu, resize it, and move it around your report just like any other object.

Best Practices for Effective Donut Charts

Whether you build your chart manually or with AI, good design principles still apply. Here are a few tips to make your donut charts clear and impactful.

Limit Your Slices: The golden rule is no more than five to seven categories. If you have more, the slices become too small to see and compare. Consider grouping smaller categories into an "Other" slice or using a bar chart instead.
Order Your Slices Logically: Arrange the data so that the largest slice starts at the 12 o'clock position and the others follow in descending order, either clockwise or counter-clockwise. This makes the data easier to interpret. Power BI often does this automatically, but you can check sort options if needed.
Use Data Labels Wisely: Don't rely on the legend alone. Clearly label slices with either percentages or values. Placing the label directly on or next to the slice is much easier for your audience to read than having to look back and forth between the chart and a legend.
Leverage the Center: The empty hole is prime real estate. Create a "Card" visual that displays the total sum of your values and resize it to fit perfectly inside the hole. This provides immediate context for the proportional slices.

Final Thoughts

Creating a donut chart in Power BI can be an intentional, click-by-click process or a quick, conversational task. Building visuals with the drag-and-drop interface gives you granular control, but using the natural language Q&A feature cuts the creation time from a minute of searching and clicking down to the ten seconds it takes to type a sentence.

This core idea of using simple conversation to get complex answers is what drives modern data analytics forward. It's why we created Graphed. We believe you shouldn't have to be a specialist just to understand your business data. While Power BI's AI can help build a single chart from one dataset, our platform lets you build entire, real-time dashboards by connecting all your platforms - like Google Analytics, Salesforce, Facebook Ads, and Shopify - and then just asking for what you need. Instead of wrangling data from different tabs, you can analyze your whole sales and marketing funnel in one place with a single question.