How to Make a Pie Chart in Excel with Words

A pie chart is one of the quickest ways to visualize data, turning rows of numbers into a simple, digestible graphic. If you're trying to show how different categories contribute to a whole - like which marketing channels brought in the most leads this quarter - a pie chart in Excel is a great way to tell that story. This guide will walk you through creating and customizing a clear, professional pie chart using text categories, step-by-step.

When to Use a Pie Chart (and When Not To)

Before you jump in, it's helpful to know when a pie chart is the right tool for the job. Pie charts excel at one thing: showing proportional composition, or how individual parts make up a whole.

Use a pie chart for things like:

• Budget Breakdowns: How your monthly department budget is allocated across different spend categories (e.g., Software, Salaries, Advertising).
• Survey Results: The percentage of respondents who chose each option in a multiple-choice question.
• Sales or Lead Sources: A breakdown of which channels (e.g., Organic Search, Paid Social, Email) contributed to the total leads.
• Market Share: How your company's market share compares to a few key competitors.

The key here is that all the "slices" must add up to 100% of something. However, pie charts have limitations. They become confusing and hard to read if you have too many categories or if the values of the slices are very close to each other.

Avoid using a pie chart when you want to:

• Show trends over time: Use a line chart or a column chart instead. It's very difficult to compare multiple pie charts side-by-side.
• Compare values between many categories: A bar chart is much better for comparing the exact values when you have more than five or six categories. Our eyes are better at judging length than they are at judging angles and area.
• Display exact numbers instead of percentages: While you can show raw numbers in a pie chart, a simple table or a bar chart often communicates this information more directly.

Getting Your Data Ready for a Pie Chart

Clean and simple data structure is the foundation of a good chart. For a pie chart that uses words, you need two columns. One column will contain your text labels (the categories), and the adjacent column will contain the corresponding numerical values for each category.

Let's say you're a marketing manager and you want to visualize where your website traffic came from last month. Your data should be organized in a simple table like this:

Example Data Setup:

• Column A: Source (These are your "words" or categories)
• Column B: Sessions (These are your numerical values)

Your spreadsheet would look something like this:

Before creating your chart, do a quick "health check" on your data:

• No Blank Rows or Columns: Make sure your data table is a contiguous block. Don't leave any empty rows or columns in the middle of your dataset, as this can confuse Excel.
• Clear Headers: Use descriptive headers for each column, like "Source" and "Sessions" in our example.
• Raw Numbers Are Fine: You don't need to pre-calculate percentages. Excel can do that for you when it creates the chart. Just use the raw counts or values.

Step-by-Step: Creating Your Pie Chart in Excel

Once your data is neatly arranged, creating the basic chart takes less than a minute. Follow these simple steps.

1. Select Your Data

Click and drag your mouse to highlight the entire data range, including both column headers. In our example, you would select cells A1 through B6. Including the headers helps Excel automatically understand what your labels and values are, and it will use them for the chart title and legend.

2. Insert the Pie Chart

With your data highlighted, navigate to the Insert tab on Excel's top ribbon. In the Charts group, you'll see a small icon that looks like a pie chart. Click on it to open a dropdown menu of chart options.

3. Choose Your Pie Chart Type

You’ll be presented with a few different styles of a pie chart:

• 2-D Pie: This is the classic, flat pie chart. It's the clearest and most commonly used option, so it’s a great place to start.
• 3-D Pie: This adds a depth effect. While it can look visually appealing, be careful, as the 3D perspective can sometimes distort the size of the slices, making the chart harder to interpret accurately.
• Doughnut: This is a pie chart with the center cut out. It works in exactly the same way but can be useful if you want to place a key metric or a total number in the center.

Select the 2-D Pie. Excel will instantly generate a pie chart and place it on your worksheet. It will have a default title (usually based on your value column's header) and a legend that maps colors to your text categories.

Customizing Your Pie Chart to Make it Clear and Professional

The default chart is a great start, but a little customization will make it much more effective and professional-looking. When you click on your new chart, two new tabs will appear on the Excel ribbon: Chart Design and Format. These are your control centers for everything that follows.

Add and Format Data Labels to Show Words and Percentages

A legend on the side of a chart forces your viewer to look back and forth between the legend colors and the pie slices. It’s much clearer to label the slices directly. This is how you really make a pie chart "with words."

1. Click on the chart to select it.
2. Go to the Chart Design tab.
3. On the far left, click Add Chart Element > Data Labels.
4. You'll see options like Center, Inside End, or Outside End. Choose Outside End for the best readability, as it places the labels next to their respective slices.

By default, the labels might only show the numerical values (e.g., 15,200). To make them more useful, we want to show both the category name (the "word") and the percentage.

1. With the data labels still selected, go back to Add Chart Element > Data Labels > More Data Label Options….
2. This will open the Format Data Labels pane on the right side of your screen.
3. Under Label Options, check the boxes for Category Name and Percentage.
4. Uncheck the box for Value to keep the label clean. You can also change the Separator from a comma to a new line for better formatting.

Now, your slices will be clearly labeled (e.g., "Organic Search - 41%"). With these labels in place, the legend is redundant, so you can click on it and press the Delete key to remove it, giving your chart more space.

Improving Colors and Style

Brand colors or a more toned-down palette can make your chart look more cohesive and professional.

• Changing Colors: On the Chart Design tab, click Change Colors to pick from a gallery of curated color palettes, including monochromatic schemes.
• Applying a Style: Next to the color options, you'll find a gallery of Chart Styles. These are pre-set combinations of design elements like shadows, outlines, and label placements. Hover over them to see a preview and pick one that suits your report.

Crafting a Good Title

Double-click the chart title to edit it. Instead of the default "Sessions," change it to something more descriptive like "Website Traffic Sources Last Month." A good title tells the viewer exactly what they're looking at with no guesswork required.

Advanced Pie Chart Tips and Tricks

Ready to take your chart to the next level? Here are a few additional techniques.

Exploding a Slice to Emphasize a Point

If you want to draw special attention to a particular category, you can "explode" it, or pull it slightly away from the center of the pie.

1. Click on the pie chart to select the entire pie.
2. Click a second time on the specific slice you want to emphasize. Now, only that slice will have selection handles on it.
3. Click and drag that slice away from the center of the pie. Don't pull it too far - just enough to create a small gap.

This is a great visual cue to highlight the most important piece of data, such as your company's market share or the top-performing campaign.

Using "Pie of Pie" or "Bar of Pie" Charts for Cluttered Data

What if you have one or two large categories and a handful of very small ones? Listing all of them can make the main pie chart cluttered. Excel has a great solution for this: a "Pie of Pie" or "Bar of Pie" chart.

This chart type automatically groups the smallest slices into an "Other" category in the main pie and then breaks them down in a second, smaller chart next to it.

1. Highlight your data and go to Insert > Pie Chart.
2. This time, select either Pie of Pie or Bar of Pie from the 2-D Pie options.
3. Excel will create the chart. You can customize how it groups the slices by right-clicking the pie and selecting Format Data Series. In the pane that opens, you can choose to group slices by position, value, or percentage value.

Final Thoughts

Creating a pie chart in Excel is a straightforward process that turns your text categories and corresponding numbers into a powerful visual. By starting with well-organized data and taking a few extra minutes to customize labels, colors, and titles, you can create a chart that communicates your message clearly and effectively.

Doing this kind of analysis in a spreadsheet is totally doable, but it can quickly become time-consuming if you’re pulling data from multiple sources like Google Analytics, your ad platforms, and your CRM every week. To speed things up, we built a tool that automates this entire process. With Graphed you simply connect your data sources once, and then you can create real-time dashboards and reports by just asking for what you want in plain English, getting back hours of your week previously spent on manual reporting.