How to Insert a Sunburst Chart in Excel

A sunburst chart is a powerful way to visualize hierarchical data directly within Excel, transforming layered information into an intuitive, circular diagram. It’s perfect for breaking down complex data sets, like sales figures by region and product or website traffic by source and campaign. This tutorial will walk you through everything from structuring your data to customizing your first sunburst chart.

What Exactly is a Sunburst Chart?

Think of a sunburst chart as a multi-level pie chart. While a standard pie chart shows the relationship of parts to a whole on a single level, a sunburst chart displays multiple levels of hierarchy simultaneously. It’s built from a series of rings, where the innermost ring represents the top-level category and each outward ring represents a deeper level of the hierarchy.

Each ring is divided into slices, and the size of each slice corresponds to its value. This makes it incredibly easy to see how a top-level category (like "Clothing") is broken down into sub-categories ("Men's" and "Women's") and then further into specific items ("T-Shirts," "Jeans," "Dresses"). It’s one of the best chart types for understanding the composition of your data a few layers deep.

The core components are:

• The Center (First Ring): This represents the root or top-level categories of your data. For a sales report, this might be continents like "North America" and "Europe."
• Outer Rings: Each subsequent ring moving outwards shows the next level of the hierarchy. If the first ring is continents, the second could be countries ("USA," "Canada," "UK," "Germany").
• Slices: Each ring is segmented into slices. The size of the slice visually represents its proportion of the parent category. A large slice for the "USA" means it contributes a significant portion of "North American" sales.

When Should You Use a Sunburst Chart?

Sunburst charts are not for every dataset. They shine when you have hierarchical data, meaning your data has parent-child relationships. If you’re just comparing single categories, a bar or column chart is usually a better fit. But if you need to show the breakdown of a whole, a sunburst is an excellent choice.

Consider using a sunburst chart for:

• Sales Performance Analysis: Show total sales broken down by sales team, then by individual sales representative, and finally by product category sold. This quickly highlights top-performing teams and reps.
• Budget Allocation: Visualize a company's budget, with the top level being major departments (Marketing, R&D, Sales), the second level being specific projects, and the third level being expense types (Salaries, Software, Advertising).
• Website Traffic Breakdown: Analyze your website visitors from Google Analytics. The first level could be traffic channels (Organic, Social, Direct), the second level could be specific sources (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn), and the third could be campaigns.
• Product Inventory Breakdown: Display inventory levels organized by product category, then sub-category, and then by the individual product itself.

How to Prepare Your Data for a Sunburst Chart

Your spreadsheet’s structure is the most critical part of creating a successful sunburst chart. Excel needs the data formatted in a specific way to understand the hierarchical relationships. You'll need separate columns for each level of the hierarchy and one final column for the values.

Let's use an example of an online store's Q4 sales. The hierarchy is Category > Sub-Category > Product.

Your data should be organized like this:

Key Data Structure Rules:

• Hierarchy in Columns: Lay out your hierarchy from left to right. Column A is the parent level, Column B is the child, Column C is the grandchild, and so on.
• Value Column on the Right: The quantitative data you want to measure (like "Sales" or "Traffic") must be in the rightmost column.
• Repeat Parent Categories: Notice how "Apparel" and "Electronics" are repeated for each of their sub-items. This is essential for Excel to group the data correctly. Don't leave any cells in the hierarchy columns blank.
• No Totals Needed: You don't need to add summary rows for totals or sub-totals. Excel calculates all of that for you when it creates the chart.

Step-by-Step: Inserting a Sunburst Chart in Excel

Once your data is correctly formatted, creating the chart takes just a few clicks.

1. Select Your Data: Click anywhere within your data table. Then, you can either click and drag to select the entire range, including the headers (e.g., A1:D11 in our example), or use the shortcut Ctrl + A (or Cmd + A on Mac) to select the entire contiguous data region.
2. Navigate to the Insert Tab: Go to the "Insert" tab on the Excel ribbon at the top of the screen.
3. Find Hierarchy Charts: In the "Charts" group, look for an icon that looks like a little blue and orange hierarchy diagram. It's officially called "Insert Hierarchy Chart."
4. Choose "Sunburst": Clicking the "Hierarchy Chart" icon will reveal two options: "Treemap" and "Sunburst." Click on "Sunburst" to insert it into your worksheet.

And that’s it! Excel will instantly generate a sunburst chart based on your selected data. The "Apparel," "Electronics," and "Home Goods" categories will form the inner ring, the sub-categories will form the second ring, and the products will form the outermost ring. The size of each slice will reflect its sales value.

Customizing and Formatting Your Sunburst Chart

Excel’s default chart is a great start, but a little formatting can make it much clearer and more professional.

Changing the Chart Title

Excel will likely give your chart a generic title like "Chart Title." First thing you should do is replace it with a descriptive title. Simply click on the chart title and type something better, like "Q4 Sales by Product Category."

Adjusting Colors and Styles

Once you click on the chart, two new tabs will appear on the ribbon: "Chart Design" and "Format."

• Chart Design: This is the quickest way to improve the look of your chart. You can use "Change Colors" to pick from a set of coordinated color palettes or browse the "Chart Styles" to apply a pre-designed layout with different backgrounds and effects.
• Format: For manual control, click on a specific data series (like one of the rings) within the chart. The "Format" tab allows you to change the "Shape Fill" for individual slices, which is useful if you want to highlight a specific item.

Formatting Data Labels

Data labels are crucial for making your chart understandable. Right-click anywhere on the chart and select "Format Data Labels." This opens a pane with several options:

• Label Contains: You can choose to show the "Series Name," "Category Name," and/or "Value." For a sunburst chart, showing just the category name often works best to avoid clutter. Viewers can infer the value from the slice size.
• Number Format: If you are displaying values, you can adjust the number format here (e.g., format as "Currency" with no decimal places).
• Position: Change the label positions for readability, although the default "Best Fit" usually works well.

Sunburst vs. Treemap: Which One Should You Choose?

When you clicked the Hierarchy chart button, you saw another option called a Treemap. Both Treemaps and Sunbursts are used for hierarchical data, but they visualize it differently.

• A Treemap displays data as a set of nested rectangles. The size of each rectangle represents its value. Like a sunburst chart, higher-level categories contain the smaller rectangles of their sub-categories.
• A Sunburst Chart is better for showing the relationship between the different layers of the hierarchy. The circular, flowing design makes it very clear how the parts make up the whole across levels.

The general guideline is:

• Use a Sunburst chart when the hierarchy itself is important and you want to emphasize the part-to-whole relationship across different levels. They work great with 2-3 levels of data.
• Use a Treemap when you have many leaf nodes (the innermost items in the hierarchy) and your main goal is to compare their values. A treemap often makes more efficient use of space than a sunburst chart, making it easier to compare the sizes of dozens of small rectangles.

Final Thoughts

Learning how to insert and format sunburst charts in Excel gives you a powerful new tool for telling a story with your data. By structuring your hierarchy correctly, you can create a compelling visual that reveals insights that might have been lost in a simple table or bar chart, all in a few simple clicks.

Manually preparing and formatting that data in Excel is often the most time-consuming step, especially if you're pulling information weekly from different marketing, sales, or e-commerce platforms. We built Graphed to solve exactly this problem. Instead of wrestling with CSVs, you can just connect your sources like Shopify or Google Analytics directly, and our AI data analyst builds real-time, interactive dashboards for you just by asking for them in plain English. This lets you skip the data prep and jump straight to the insights.