How to Make a Circle Chart in Google Sheets with ChatGPT
Creating a circle chart, also known as a pie chart, in Google Sheets is an excellent way to show how individual parts make up a whole. It’s perfect for visualizing things like budget allocations or sources of web traffic. This guide will walk you through building a circle chart in Google Sheets step-by-step and then show you how you can use ChatGPT to make the whole process faster and smarter.
What Exactly is a Circle Chart?
A circle chart is a circular graph that's divided into slices, where each slice represents a category's proportion of the total. Think of it like a pizza - the entire pizza is your total (100%), and each slice is a different topping representing a percentage of that total. If pepperoni covers half the pizza, its slice takes up 50% of the circle.
When Should You Use a Circle Chart?
Circle charts shine when you need to illustrate a "part-to-whole" relationship. They're incredibly effective for:
Showing Percentages: They are optimal for showing the percentage-based composition of a single data set.
Budget Breakdowns: Displaying how a marketing budget is allocated across different channels (e.g., Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Content).
Market Share: Visualizing how different companies divide up the market.
Survey Results: Breaking down responses from a multiple-choice question (e.g., "How did you hear about us?").
Traffic Sources: Showing what percentage of your website traffic comes from Organic Search, Social Media, Direct, etc.
When Should You NOT Use a Circle Chart?
While useful, they aren't a one-size-fits-all solution. You should avoid using a circle chart when:
You Have Too Many Categories: A pie chart with more than 6-7 slices becomes cluttered and very difficult to read. The slices get too thin to compare effectively.
You're Comparing Data Over Time: A bar chart or line graph is much better for showing trends, like monthly sales over a year.
The Parts Don't Add Up to 100%: A circle chart must represent a complete whole. If the categories are not mutually exclusive or don't sum to a total, a pie chart will be misleading.
Categories Have Very Similar Values: It's hard for the human eye to accurately compare the size of similar-looking slices. A simple bar chart would show the subtle differences much more clearly.
How to Make a Circle Chart in Google Sheets
Let’s start with the traditional method. We’ll build a chart that shows an imaginary company’s website traffic sources for the month.
Step 1: Set Up and Format Your Data
The key to any good chart is well-organized data. For a circle chart, you need two columns:
Column A: The category labels (e.g., Organic Search, Social Media).
Column B: The corresponding numerical values (e.g., the number of sessions, sales amount).
Important: The values in Column B must be numbers. Don’t include commas, currency symbols, or any other text in the data cells themselves. You can format them later.
Here’s the sample data we’ll use. Type or copy this into your Google Sheet:
Traffic Source | Sessions |
Organic Search | 5400 |
Direct | 2150 |
Paid Social | 1800 |
1250 | |
Referral | 700 |
Step 2: Select Your Data
Click and drag your cursor to highlight all the cells containing your data, including the headers ("Traffic Source" and "Sessions").
Step 3: Insert the Chart
With your data selected, navigate to the top menu and click Insert > Chart. Google Sheets is usually smart enough to recognize part-to-whole data and will often default to a pie chart automatically. If it suggests a different chart type, don’t worry - it’s an easy fix.
Step 4: Customize Your Circle Chart
Once you insert the chart, the Chart Editor sidebar will appear on the right. This is where you customize your chart to make it clear and aligned with your brand.
The editor is broken into two main tabs: Setup and Customize.
In the 'Setup' Tab:
Chart Type: If Google Sheets didn't automatically pick a pie chart, you can select it from this dropdown menu. You’ll find "Pie" under the chart suggestions. You can also pick a "Doughnut chart" from this list, which is essentially a pie chart with a hole in the middle.
In the 'Customize' Tab:
This is where you can fine-tune the look and feel.
Chart Style: Change the background color, font, or make it a 3D pie chart (though be careful with 3D, as it can sometimes distort perception).
Pie Chart: Specify doughnut hole size (if you chose a doughnut chart), border color, and - most importantly - slice labels. Best practice is to set the slice label to Percentage to make it instantly clear what each piece represents.
Pie Slice: Select individual slices to change their color. This is great for aligning with your brand colors or highlighting a specific category (e.g., making the "Organic Search" slice a standout color).
Chart & Axis Titles: Change the main title of your chart to be more descriptive, like "Monthly Website Traffic Sources."
Legend: Adjust the position of the legend (the key showing which color belongs to which category) or change its font.
After a few tweaks, you’ll have a professional-looking circle chart that clearly tells a story with your data.
Speeding Up Your Workflow with ChatGPT
Now, while the manual process is straightforward, the single biggest time-sink in creating charts isn't building the chart itself - it's preparing the data. Raw data is often messy, unformatted, and not ready for visualization. This is where using ChatGPT as a data assistant can save you a ton of time.
ChatGPT can't directly access or create charts inside your personal Google Sheet. Instead, you can use it to prepare, summarize, and format the data before you paste it into Sheets.
Use Case 1: Organizing and Summarizing Messy Data
Imagine you exported a raw list of user signups, and it's messy. You have a long list with a source for each signup, and you just want a clean summary to visualize.
Your Prompt to ChatGPT:
"I have a list of user signups from last month. I need you to summarize the count for each signup source so I can make a circle chart in Google Sheets. Here is the raw data:
[Paste your raw, messy data list here]"
ChatGPT will process the chaotic list and give you back a perfectly clean, two-column table showing each unique source and the total number of signups. You can copy this table, paste it directly into Google Sheets, and create your circle chart in seconds. What could have taken 20 minutes of filtering and counting is done in one go.
Use Case 2: Calculating Percentages in Your Table
While Google Sheets can add percentage labels to the chart itself, sometimes you want a percentage column right in your data table for reference. ChatGPT can do this calculation for you instantly.
Let’s use our original website traffic data.
Your Prompt to ChatGPT:
"Here is my website traffic data. Can you create a three-column table from this? I need the original source and sessions, plus a third column that calculates the percentage of total traffic for each source.
Organic Search, 5400 Direct, 2150 Paid Social, 1800 Email, 1250 Referral, 700"
ChatGPT's Output:
It will return a neatly formatted table, complete with the calculated percentages, that you can paste directly into Sheets. This saves you from having to write formulas and format an extra column yourself.
Use Case 3: Generating Sample Data for Mock-ups
Sometimes you need to create a chart for a presentation or dashboard mock-up before you have the final numbers. Instead of making up data yourself, you can ask ChatGPT to generate realistic sample data for you.
Your Prompt to ChatGPT:
"Act as a marketing analyst. I am creating a circle chart for a presentation to show a Q1 budget breakdown. My total budget is $100,000. Can you create a sample dataset for me in a two-column format? Include 5 realistic marketing channels and their budget allocation."
ChatGPT will produce a table with logical categories (e.g., SEO, Content Marketing, PPC Ads) and realistic numbers that add up to your total budget. It’s perfect for creating professional-looking placeholders.
Important Things to Keep in Mind
Using ChatGPT this way is incredibly powerful, but it's important to be aware of a few things:
Data Privacy: Be very careful about pasting sensitive information into third-party AI tools. Don't use real names, email addresses, personally identifiable information, or confidential company financials. Always anonymize or use sample data when dealing with sensitive information.
It's a Helper, Not a Direct Integration: Remember, you are using ChatGPT to prepare data outside of Sheets. It doesn't have live access to your file to create the chart for you. Think of it as an extremely fast data entry assistant.
Trust, but Verify: For mission-critical calculations, always give the AI's output a quick check to ensure accuracy. While typically very reliable for summarization and percentages, it’s always smart to double-check its work.
Final Thoughts
Creating a circle chart in Google Sheets is a direct process of structuring your data columns, selecting the info, and customizing the output. Using a tool like ChatGPT for data prep won't change those final clicks in Sheets, but it can turn a half-day-long reporting project with raw data export into a five-minute-long task, which is a major time-saver for anyone who spends too much time doing spreadsheet work already.
Manually preparing and visualizing data in spreadsheets is a great skill, but the next step is connecting your tools to live data so your reports stay up-to-date automatically. We created Graphed to solve this very problem. It lets you connect to marketing and sales platforms like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Facebook Ads, and then simply ask in plain English for the exact dashboard you need. Instead of wrestling with CSV files, you can just say, "Show me a pie chart of our top-selling products by revenue this quarter," and get an interactive, live dashboard in seconds - no data prep required.