How to Explode in Excel

Showing your data is one thing, making it tell a story is another. One of the simplest ways to guide your audience’s attention in a report is to highlight what truly matters. Excel's "explode" feature is a powerful yet simple tool for doing just that - pulling a key piece of data away from the rest to make it the star of the show. This guide will walk you through exactly how to explode slices in pie charts and, using a clever workaround, even specific bars in a bar chart to create more impactful and persuasive reports.

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What Does It Mean to "Explode" a Chart in Excel?

Exploding a chart element in Excel simply means moving it slightly away from the center of the chart. Imagine a freshly baked pie where you pull one slice out just a little to show off how good it looks. That’s exactly what an exploded pie chart does. A single slice - or all of them - is separated from the others to create a visual break that instantly draws the eye.

Why do this? The goal is to create emphasis. You might use it to:

• Shine a spotlight on your top-performing sales region.
• Draw attention to the most significant source of website traffic.
• Highlight a problem area, like the biggest category for customer complaints.

It's a subtle but effective data storytelling technique. Instead of just presenting numbers, you’re actively guiding your reader's interpretation and saying, "Hey, look here. This is the important part."

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How to Explode a Pie Chart in Excel (Step-by-Step)

The pie chart is the most common place you'll use the explode feature. Let’s walk through the process with a simple example: a breakdown of marketing channel traffic.

1. Set Up Your Data and Create a Basic Pie Chart

First, you need clean data. Let's say you have a table like this, showing website sessions from different channels:

To create your pie chart:

1. Select the entire data range (including headers, so A1:B6 in this case).
2. Go to the Insert tab on Excel's ribbon.
3. Click the Pie Chart icon and select the first option, a simple 2-D Pie.

You now have a basic pie chart representing all your channels.

2. Exploding a Single Slice of the Pie

Let’s say Organic Search is your top performer, and you want to highlight it. Exploding just that one slice is the most impactful way to use this feature.

Here’s the trick:

1. Click once anywhere on the pie chart. You'll see selection handles appear around the entire pie, confirming you've selected all the slices.
2. Now, click a second time only on the slice you want to explode (in our case, the 'Organic Search' slice). The selection handles will disappear from the other slices, leaving just the target slice selected.
3. With that single slice selected, click and drag it outwards, away from the center of the pie.

That's all it takes. Your 'Organic Search' slice is now visually separated, immediately telling your audience that it's the most significant piece of the puzzle.

3. Exploding All Slices of the Pie

Sometimes, you might want to separate all the slices for a more stylized, deconstructed look. This is less about emphasizing one piece and more about providing visual separation between all of them.

1. Click once anywhere on the pie chart to select the entire chart area (you'll see the selection handles on all slices).
2. Right-click on the pie and select Format Data Series... from the dropdown menu.
3. A formatting pane will open on the right side of your screen. Under Series Options, you'll see a slider for 'Pie Explosion.'
4. Drag the slider to the right or enter a percentage (e.g., 10%) into the box. All the slices will move outwards from the center at the same time.

This method gives you precise control over the distance of the explosion and applies it uniformly to every slice.

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A More Advanced Trick: How to Explode a Bar Chart

Excel doesn't have a built-in "explode" function for bar or column charts, which is a shame because highlighting a single high-performing month or product in a series is a very common need. But don't worry - with a clever workaround using a combination chart, you can achieve the same effect.

1. Restructure Your Data for the Highlight

First, we need to create a new series in our data that only contains the value we want to highlight. Let's say we have monthly sales figures, and we want to explode the bar for our top-performing month.

Here’s the original data:

To highlight the best month (March), create a third column called Highlight. In this column, we’ll use an IF formula to check if the sales value for that row is the maximum value in the range. If it is, we show the value, if not, we return an NA() error.

In cell C2, enter this formula and drag it down:

=IF(B2=MAX($B$2:$B$6),B2,NA())

Here's why this works: The NA() is crucial because it tells Excel to leave a blank on the chart. If you used 0 or "" instead, Excel would plot a zero-value bar, which we don't want.

Your data should now look like this:

2. Create a Combo Chart with a Secondary Axis

Now we create our chart:

1. Select all your data, including the new Highlight column (A1:C6).
2. Go to Insert > Recommended Charts > All Charts.
3. Select Combo at the bottom of the list.
4. For both the Sales and Highlight series, set the chart type to Clustered Column.
5. Check the box for Secondary Axis for the Highlight series.
6. Click OK.

You’ll now have a chart where the March bar appears directly in front of the original March bar. We’re almost there.

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3. Format the Axes to Create the "Exploded" Effect

Now for the final touch. We'll make the highlighted bar wider than the original bar so it creates a border-like effect, appearing to "explode" out.

1. Right-click on the highlighted March bar (the one in front) and choose Format Data Series....
2. In the format pane, under Series Options, find the 'Gap Width' slider. Reduce the gap width to something small, like 75%. This makes the bar wider.
3. Now, right-click on one of the original gray bars (behind the highlight) and choose Format Data Series....
4. Leave the Gap Width at Excel's default (usually around 219%). This ensures this series' bars stay thinner.

Finally, give your highlighted bar a standout color. Now you have a beautiful bar chart where your peak month is impossible to miss. It appears larger and more prominent than the others - effectively exploded.

Final Thoughts

Using the explode feature in Excel is a straightforward way to add narrative power to your data visualizations. Whether you’re separating a key slice of a pie or using the combo chart workaround to spotlight a single bar, you're making a conscious choice to guide your audience, making your reports clearer and more persuasive.

Of course, manually creating and tweaking these charts for weekly or monthly reports can become repetitive. We actually built Graphed to solve this very problem. Instead of wrestling with data sets and formatting panes in a spreadsheet, I can now simply connect tools like Google Analytics or Salesforce and ask questions directly. For example, I could type "create a pie chart of our top lead sources and explode the biggest slice" and get a live, interactive chart built automatically, saving valuable time I used to spend on manual reporting.