How to Make a Pie Chart in Google Sheets with ChatGPT

Creating a pie chart in Google Sheets is a fantastic way to visualize how different pieces contribute to a whole picture. This guide will walk you through the process step-by-step, showing you not just how to build a basic chart, but how to customize it beautifully and even use ChatGPT to speed things up, from generating sample data to helping you craft the perfect title.

When Should You Use a Pie Chart?

Before jumping in, it's helpful to know when a pie chart is the right tool for the job. Pie charts excel at one thing: showing parts of a whole. Think of them as a visual way to represent percentages that add up to 100%.

They work best when you have:

• A small number of categories: Ideally, you should have seven slices or fewer. Any more than that, and the chart becomes cluttered and difficult to read, like a pizza with too many toppings.

• Positive numerical values: The data in each slice must be a positive number.

• Categories that are mutually exclusive: One piece of data should not fall into multiple categories.

Great use cases for pie charts include showing monthly budget allocations, survey results for a single-choice question, or breaking down website traffic sources for a given period. Avoid using them to compare data over time or to display datasets with many categories, a line or bar chart is almost always better for those tasks.

Step 1: Get Your Data Ready (with a Little Help from AI)

The foundation of any good chart is well-organized data. Luckily, the structure required for a pie chart in Google Sheets is incredibly simple.

How to Structure Your Data for a Pie Chart

All you need is two columns:

• Column A: Categories. These will become the labels for each slice of your pie (e.g., 'Organic Search', 'Social Media', 'Direct').

• Column B: Values. These are the corresponding numbers for each category that determine the size of each slice (e.g., the number of visitors from each source).

Your data table should look something like this:

Using ChatGPT to Generate Sample Data

Don't have your data handy, or just want to practice building a chart? You can ask ChatGPT to create perfectly structured sample data for you in seconds. It saves you the time of making things up and ensures the format is correct.

Just give ChatGPT a clear prompt describing what you need. For example, you could ask:

Act as a digital marketing analyst. I need to make a pie chart in Google Sheets showing a breakdown of sales by product category for Q2. Our total revenue was $500,000.

Please create a small, two-column table for me. The first column should be 'Product Category' and the second should be 'Sales ($)'. Include 5 realistic categories.

And you’ll get back a nice clean table you can copy and paste directly into Google Sheets, ready to go.

Step 2: Creating the Basic Pie Chart in Google Sheets

Once your data is in the sheet, making the chart itself only takes a few clicks. It’s much easier than most people think!

Follow these quick steps:

1. Select your data. Click and drag your cursor to highlight all the cells containing your data, including the headers in both columns (e.g., from cell A1 to B6 in our example).

2. Insert the chart. Go to the menu at the top of the screen and click Insert > Chart.

3. Choose the chart type. Google Sheets is smart and will often correctly guess that you want a pie chart based on your data structure. If it defaults to something else, don't worry. In the "Chart editor" pane that appears on the right, find the Chart type dropdown under the Setup tab. Scroll down to the 'Pie' section and select the standard pie chart option.

And just like that, you have a pie chart! It's functional, but now comes the fun part: making it look great and easy to understand.

Step 3: Customizing Your Pie Chart to Tell a Better Story

A default pie chart gets the job done, but taking a few minutes to customize it can transform it from a simple graphic into a professional, compelling visual. All these options are found in the Customize tab of the Chart editor panel.

Chart Style

This section lets you change the overall appearance of your chart.

• Background color: You can change the background to match your presentation's theme.

• Font: Choose a font that's easy to read and aligns with your brand style.

• 3D option: While Google Sheets offers a 3D option, be cautious. 3D charts can distort the proportions of the slices, making smaller-looking slices appear larger than they are, which can be misleading. A flat 2D chart is almost always better for data accuracy.

• Compare mode: Turn this on to see how values compare in a tooltip when you hover over a slice.

Pie Chart/Slices

This is where you can dial in the specifics of your pie itself.

• Donut hole: I'm a big fan of this one. Adding a 'Donut hole' (anywhere from 25% to 75%) turns your pie chart into a donut chart, which many people find more aesthetically pleasing and easier to read. It reduces the emphasis on misleading slice angles.

• Slice colors: Don't settle for the default colors. You can change each slice individually. This is great for aligning the chart with your brand’s color palette or for making a specific slice - like your most important traffic source - stand out.

• Distance from center: Want to highlight a particularly important slice? You can "explode" it out from the center to draw extra attention to it. Just select the slice from the dropdown and set the distance.

Chart & Axis Titles

Never leave your chart untitled! A clear title is crucial for comprehension. Give your chart a descriptive title like "Website Traffic Sources: Q2 2024." You can change its Alignment, Font, Size, and Color to make it prominent and clear.

Legend

The legend explains what each color-coded slice represents. Under the 'Legend' section, you can change its position (Position dropdown) to wherever it fits best - the bottom, top, left, or right of the chart. For a cleaner look, especially with donut charts, you can often remove the legend entirely by selecting 'None' and placing labels directly on the slices instead.

Pie Slice Labels

This is perhaps the most important customization for clarity. Instead of forcing your audience to look back and forth between the legend and the chart, you can put the information right where they need it. In the 'Pie chart' section, under 'Slice label', you have several options:

• Label: Shows the category name on each slice.

• Value: Shows the raw number.

• Percentage: Shows the category's percentage of the total. This is highly recommended for pie charts.

• Value and percentage: Shows both.

Putting the Percentage or Label directly on a slice makes your chart instantly readable.

Using ChatGPT for Advanced Customization

ChatGPT's utility doesn't end with data generation. You can also use it as a smart assistant to help with more advanced parts of chart creation, especially when it comes to formulas.

Writing Dynamic Chart Titles

Let's say you update your chart every month. Manually changing the title is a small but annoying task. You can make it dynamic so it updates automatically. Not sure how? Ask ChatGPT.

Here's a sample prompt:

In my Google Sheet, I have the word 'July' in cell E2. I want to create a dynamic chart title in another cell that says "Monthly Sales Breakdown: July". Can you give me the formula to do this?

ChatGPT will provide the formula instantly:

"Monthly Sales Breakdown: " & E2

Now, just copy that formula into any empty cell. Then, double-click your chart's title, and instead of typing text, simply type '=' followed by the cell containing your formula (e.g., '=F2'). Voilà! Now, whenever you change the month in cell E2, your chart title updates automatically.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Keep these common pitfalls in mind to ensure your pie charts are clear and accurate:

• Too many slices: If you have more than seven categories, your pie chart will be hard to read. Consider grouping smaller categories into one "Other" slice or using a bar chart instead.

• Slices that don't add to 100%: A pie chart must represent a complete whole. The data should always sum up to the total.

• Using multiple pie charts for comparison: While it seems logical, comparing slices across two different pie charts is difficult for the human eye. A stacked bar chart is a much better choice for comparing distributions.

• Forgetting labels and titles: An unlabeled chart is just a colorful circle. Make sure your audience knows exactly what they are looking at.

Final Thoughts

Combining the user-friendly interface of Google Sheets with the generative power of ChatGPT makes creating insightful, professional-looking pie charts easier than ever before. By following a clear structure, customizing thoughtfully, and avoiding common errors, you can transform simple data into a visual story that helps your team understand performance at a glance.

While this approach is great for building individual charts, the entire process of getting your data ready can become manual when you're managing reports for multiple sources like Google Analytics, your ad platforms, and your CRM. We built Graphed to completely remove this friction. Instead of exporting data and building charts by hand, you just connect your sources and describe what you want to see - "Show a pie chart of my Shopify sales by marketing channel for last month." We build a real-time dashboard for you instantly, allowing you and your team to focus on the insights, not the manual setup work.