How to Make a Circle Chart in Excel with AI

Building a circle chart in Excel should be simple, but it can quickly turn into a frustrating maze of clicks, formatting options, and data wrangling. While Excel has been the go-to for decades, creating even a basic pie or doughnut chart often feels more manual than it should be. This guide will walk you through the traditional methods for making circle charts in Excel, explore its newer "AI-like" features, and show you a much faster way to get the visualizations you need using true natural language.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

Understanding Circle Charts: Pie vs. Doughnut

Before jumping into Excel, let's quickly clarify what we mean by a "circle chart." Most people are referring to one of two popular types: the pie chart or the doughnut chart. They're similar but have subtle differences in how they're used.

A pie chart is a classic way to show parts of a whole. Each "slice" represents a category, and the size of the slice shows its proportion relative to the total. Think of it like a pizza - it's great for showing what percentage of your marketing budget goes to social media, PPC, and content, respectively.

A doughnut chart is essentially a pie chart with the center cut out. That hole isn't just for looks, it provides a great space to display a key piece of information, like the grand total, a headline metric, or an important KPI. For example, you could show revenue by product line as the "ring," and the total revenue for the quarter in the center.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

When to Use (and Avoid) Circle Charts

Circle charts are powerful, but only when used in the right context. They excel at showing simple compositions at a single point in time.

Use a circle chart when:

• You are showing proportions of a single whole (e.g., market share, survey responses, budget allocation).
• You have fewer than seven categories. Any more and the chart becomes cluttered and impossible to read.
• The values for each category add up to 100%.

Avoid a circle chart when:

• You need to compare data over time. A line or column chart is much better for showing trends.
• You have many categories. A bar chart is far easier to read when comparing ten different products.
• You need to show precise comparisons between categories. It's notoriously difficult for the human eye to accurately compare the size of different angled slices.

Method 1: The Classic Way to Build Circle Charts Manually

For most Excel users, this is the familiar, hands-on method. It gives you full control but requires you to know exactly where to click. Let’s create a chart showing website traffic by source.

Step-by-Step: Creating a Pie Chart

First, you need to structure your data. Excel needs a simple, two-column layout: one for your categories (the traffic sources) and one for your values (the sessions).

Let's say your spreadsheet looks like this:

Here’s how to turn that data into a pie chart:

1. Select your data: Click and drag your cursor to highlight all the cells containing your data, including the headers (from your "Source" cell to the last number).
2. Insert the Chart: Go to the Insert tab on the Excel ribbon. In the "Charts" section, click the icon that looks like a pie chart.
3. Choose Your Style: A dropdown will appear with different chart options, like 2-D Pie, 3-D Pie, and Doughnut. For this example, select the standard 2-D Pie.

Excel will instantly generate a basic pie chart and place it on your worksheet. It's functional, but it could definitely use some improvements to make it easier to understand at a glance.

*Pro Tip: To make your doughnut chart more impactful, click inside the center hole to select it. Right-click and choose "Format Data Point," then create a text box from the "Insert" menu to add your key metric (like Total Sessions) in the middle.*

Customizing Your Chart for Clarity

A default chart is rarely a finished chart. Here are the most essential customizations:

• Add a Chart Title: Double-click the default "Chart Title" to give it a descriptive name like "Website Traffic by Source - Q3."
• Add Data Labels: Right-click on any slice of the pie and select Add Data Labels. This will add the session numbers to each slice. To make it more useful, right-click the labels themselves and choose Format Data Labels. In the formatting pane that appears, you can tick the box for Percentage to show proportions, which is what pie charts are all about.
• Adjust Colors and Design: Click on the chart to bring up the Chart Design tab. From here, you can choose from different pre-made color palettes and styles to match your company branding or presentation.

Method 2: Using Excel's Built-in "Smart" Features

Microsoft has been integrating more "AI-like" features into Excel to help speed up common tasks. While not a true conversational AI, these tools can sometimes offer a helpful shortcut.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

Letting Excel's "Recommended Charts" Do the Work

If you're not sure which chart type is best for your data, Excel can offer suggestions.

1. Select your data just as you did before.
2. Navigate to the Insert tab.
3. Instead of picking a specific chart, click on Recommended Charts.

Excel will analyze the structure of your data and present a few options it thinks are a good fit. If your data represents parts of a whole, it will very likely suggest a pie chart among its top choices. You can simply select it and click "OK" to insert it. This is helpful for beginners but acts more as a smart template selector than a real analytical assistant.

Getting Quick Insights with "Analyze Data"

The "Analyze Data" feature (formerly known as "Ideas") is Excel's most advanced attempt at AI-powered analysis. It goes a step further by not only suggesting charts but also trying to answer questions about your data in natural language.

1. Make sure a cell within your data range is selected.
2. Go to the Home tab and click the Analyze Data button on the far right.
3. A pane will open up on the side, automatically generating a few insights and visuals.
4. You can also type a question into the search box at the top, for example: "Show sessions by source as a pie chart."

If it understands your query, "Analyze Data" will generate a chart for you. While powerful, this feature is best for initial data exploration. It's not designed to be a streamlined report builder, and the charts it creates are often basic pivot charts that may require additional formatting and manual adjustments before being ready for a final dashboard.

The Hurdles You'll Face with Excel

No matter which method you use, relying on Excel for your reporting often comes with the same set of frustrations. Whether you're a data analyst or a marketing manager, these probably sound familiar:

• Manual Data Entry: The process nearly always begins with manual work. You're downloading CSVs from Google Analytics, Shopify, Facebook Ads, or your CRM and then copying and pasting the data into a spreadsheet. This is tedious, time-consuming, and prone to errors.
• Static, Outdated Charts: An Excel chart is a snapshot in time. The moment a new sale is made or a new lead comes in, your chart is already out of date. To refresh it, you have to repeat the entire manual data export and import process.
• Requires "Excel Literacy": You still have to know the lingo. Whether you’re creating formulas, pivot tables, or simply formatting a chart, you need a certain level of Excel knowledge. A team member who isn't an "Excel person" can't easily jump in and get answers.
• No Real-Time Insights: The typical reporting cadence looks like this: spend Monday pulling data, Tuesday building the report, and Wednesday answering follow-up questions from the meeting presentation report. By then, half the week is gone and you're making decisions based on old data.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

The Modern Alternative: Creating Charts with Natural Language

What if you could skip the CSV downloads, the VLOOKUPs, and the endless formatting panes entirely? Modern AI-powered data platforms change the game by letting you create charts just by describing what you want to see.

Instead of wrestling with spreadsheet cells, the process looks more like this:

1. Connect your data sources directly. With a few clicks, you link your tools - Google Analytics, HubSpot, Salesforce, Facebook Ads - eliminating the need for manual data exports forever.
2. Ask for a chart in plain English. You simply type a prompt, just like you would to a colleague: "Create a circle chart showing the split of website traffic by source for last month."
3. Get an instant, live chart. The AI understands your request. It knows what "traffic by source" means in Google Analytics, it interprets the date range correctly, and it generates a clean, professional pie chart in seconds.

The best part is that this chart is live. Since it’s connected directly to your data source, it's always up to date. You can ask follow-up questions like "Now show that for Canada only" or "Which campaign had the best ROI?" to drill down and explore your data without creating a single formula or clicking another button on the Excel ribbon.

Final Thoughts

Mastering circle charts in Excel is a valuable skill, and you can create solid visualizations using either its manual tools or smart features like Analyze Data. However, these methods are still rooted in a manual, time-consuming process of gathering and preparing data before you can even begin your analysis.

This modern, conversational approach to building reports is exactly why we built Graphed. We believe you should be able to get answers from your data without needing to become a spreadsheet expert. By connecting your sales and marketing platforms, Graphed lets you use simple, natural language to instantly build live dashboards and reports. Instead of spending hours compiling data, you can build a complete performance dashboard in minutes just by asking, giving you back the time to focus on making smart decisions that actually grow your business.