How to Make a Sunburst Chart

A sunburst chart is a powerful way to visualize hierarchical data, showing how a whole is divided into parts across multiple levels. If you need to understand the composition of your data from the broadest category down to the finest detail, this is the chart for you. This tutorial will walk you through what sunburst charts are, when to use them, and how to create your own, step-by-step.

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What Exactly is a Sunburst Chart?

Think of a sunburst chart as a multi-layered pie chart. At its center is the root or the top-level category. Moving outward, each concentric ring represents a deeper level in the hierarchy, with its segments breaking down the categories of the inner ring. The size of each segment, or "slice," is proportional to its value. This allows you to see at a glance how individual sub-categories contribute to a larger segment and, ultimately, to the whole. It gets its name from its appearance, which looks like a bursting sun with rays extending outwards.

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Key Components:

• The Center Circle: This is the starting point, representing the grand total or the highest-level category of your entire dataset (e.g., "Total Annual Sales").
• The Rings (or Levels): Each ring moving out from the center represents the next level down in your data's hierarchy. The first ring might show sales by continent, the second by country, and the third by city.
• The Slices: Within each ring, the slices represent the specific categories at that level (e.g., "North America," "Europe," "Asia"). The arc length or area of each slice shows its value relative to its parent slice in the inner ring.

When to Use a Sunburst Chart (and When to Avoid It)

Like any data visualization, a sunburst chart is the perfect tool for some jobs and the wrong one for others. Knowing when to use it is just as important as knowing how to create it.

Ideal Use Cases

• Displaying Hierarchical Data: This is their primary function. They are fantastic for showing organizational structures, product taxonomies, budget allocations by department and project, or website traffic broken down by channel, source, and campaign.
• Analyzing Part-to-Whole Relationships: If you need to quickly see what percentage of total revenue comes from a specific product line, and then what percentage of that product line's revenue comes from a single item, a sunburst chart makes this intuitively clear.
• Visualizing a Path: They can illustrate nested stages or paths. For example, you could show a customer support ticketing system, where the first ring is the inquiry type, the second is the resolving department, and the third is the resolution status.

When to Try Something Else

• Too Many Levels: While they handle hierarchy well, a chart with more than 3-4 levels can become visually overwhelming and difficult to read. The outer rings become very thin and the labels impossible to fit. For deeper hierarchies, a treemap or an indented list might be more effective.
• Precise Comparisons are Needed: The human eye struggles to accurately compare the sizes of different circular slices, especially if they are not next to each other. If your goal is to compare the performance of two specific sub-categories precisely, a simple bar chart is almost always the better choice.
• Long Category Names: Long labels are the enemy of a sunburst chart. They either get cut off, overlap, or force you to rely on a confusing legend, defeating the purpose of a clear visual.
• Showing Negative Values or Changes Over Time: Sunburst charts operate on part-to-whole relationships and cannot represent negative numbers. For tracking metrics over time, a line chart or area chart is far more appropriate.

How to Make a Sunburst Chart in Excel

Microsoft Excel has a built-in sunburst chart type that makes the creation process relatively simple, provided your data is structured correctly. Let's use an example of quarterly sales data for an online store.

Step 1: Structure Your Data Correctly

This is the most critical step. Your data needs to be arranged hierarchically in adjacent columns. You need columns that define the levels (your categories) and one final column for the values.

For our example, let's say our hierarchy is Quarter > Category > Product. Here's how the data should be set up:

Notice that the parent categories (like "Q1" and "Electronics") are repeated for each child entry. This flat-table format is exactly what Excel needs to understand the relationships.

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Step 2: Select Your Data

Click and drag your cursor to select the entire data range, including the column headers (from "Quarter" down to the last sales number).

Step 3: Insert the Sunburst Chart

With your data selected, navigate to the Excel ribbon:

1. Click on the Insert tab.
2. In the Charts section, find and click the "Insert Waterfall, Funnel, Stock, Surface, or Radar Chart" icon. It looks like a small blue waterfall.
3. In the dropdown menu, under the Hierarchical section, select Sunburst.

Excel will instantly generate a sunburst chart based on your selected data.

Step 4: Customize and Refine Your Chart

The default chart is a great start, but a little customization will make it much clearer and more professional. When you click on your chart, two new tabs will appear in the ribbon: Chart Design and Format.

• Give it a Clear Title: Double-click the default "Chart Title" and change it to something descriptive, like "Quarterly Sales by Category and Product."
• Adjust the Colors: In the Chart Design tab, you can use the "Change Colors" option to switch to palettes that might have better contrast or align with your brand. You can also right-click on an individual slice and use the "Fill" option to change its color manually if you want to highlight a specific area.
• Manage Data Labels: Click the green plus sign (+) next to the chart to open Chart Elements. Here you can check or uncheck Data Labels. Clicking the small arrow next to it provides more options. Showing labels directly on the chart can be better than using a legend, but be careful not to make it too cluttered.
• Refine the Legend: The automatic legend can sometimes be redundant. Consider removing it from the Chart Elements menu if your main categories are clearly understandable through color and direct labels.

A Note on Other Tools

While this guide focuses on Excel, it's worth knowing how other common tools handle this chart type.

• Google Sheets: Surprisingly, Google Sheets does not have a native, built-in sunburst chart type. You would need to find a third-party add-on from the Google Workspace Marketplace or build a custom visualization using Google Apps Script, which is a much more technical process.
• Business Intelligence Tools: Platforms like Power BI and Tableau are built for complex visualizations. They often have sunburst charts (or similar visualizations like multi-level donut charts or "sunburst slicers"). Creating one usually involves dragging your hierarchical fields into a "Details" or "Hierarchy" pane and your metric into the "Values" pane, giving you more interactive filtering and drill-down capabilities.

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Best Practices for Creating an Effective Sunburst Chart

To ensure your chart is insightful and not just decorated data, follow these guidelines:

• Start With A Question: Before you build, know what you want the chart to answer. Are you trying to see which category is underperforming? Or understand the revenue composition of an eCommerce store? Your goal will guide your design choices.
• Keep It Simple: Limit your hierarchy to 3, or at the absolute most, 4 levels. Anything more and the chart loses clarity.
• Order Your Data Purposefully: Sorting the data in your underlying table (e.g., largest to smallest value) can create a more organized-looking chart where similar-sized slices are grouped together, making visual comparison slightly easier.
• Use Color for Clarity, Not Just Decoration: Assign distinct colors to your top-level categories. Allowing sub-categories to be shades of the parent color helps reinforce their relationship. Avoid using too many clashing colors.
• Combine with Other Information: A sunburst chart rarely tells the whole story on its own. Accompany it with a key metric (like total revenue), a one-sentence summary of the main insight, or a complementary bar chart that allows for more precise comparisons.

Final Thoughts

A sunburst chart is an excellent tool for breaking down complex hierarchical data into an easily digestible visual. By structuring your data correctly in a tool like Excel, you can create a compelling "part-of-a-whole" story in just a few clicks, revealing the composition of your business from a bird's-eye view down to the details.

When the challenge moves beyond making one chart to constantly connecting and exploring data from places like Google Analytics, Shopify, and your CRM, the manual setup can become a bottleneck. We built Graphed to solve this by automating the tedious parts of reporting. Instead of spending hours wrangling data and formatting charts in different tools, you simply ask for what you want in plain English - like "create a dashboard showing Shopify sales broken down by marketing channel from GA4" - and get a live, automated dashboard in seconds, so you can focus on insights instead of setup.