How to Make a Sunburst Chart in Excel with ChatGPT

A Sunburst chart is one of the most effective ways in Excel to display hierarchical data, showing how outer rings relate to an inner ring. While they look impressive, getting your data structured correctly can be a real headache. This tutorial will walk you through building a Sunburst chart in Excel and show you how to use an AI assistant like ChatGPT to handle the most time-consuming part: preparing your data.

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What Exactly Is a Sunburst Chart?

Think of a Sunburst chart as a multi-level pie chart. The center circle represents the top level of your hierarchy, and each subsequent ring moving outward represents a deeper level. The size of each segment in a ring shows its proportion relative to its parent segment in the ring closer to the center.

This type of chart is perfect for visualizing "part-to-whole" relationships across multiple levels. For example, you could show:

• Total company revenue (center).
• Broken down by Continent (first ring).
• Then by Country within each continent (second ring).
• And finally, by Product Category sold in each country (third ring).

At a glance, you can see not only which continent brings in the most revenue, but also which specific country or product category is the biggest contributor within that larger piece. It’s far more insightful than trying to make sense of four separate pie charts.

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Step 1: Prepare Your Data for a Sunburst Chart

Here’s the part where most people get tripped up. Sunburst charts in Excel require your data to be organized in a very specific hierarchical format. You need columns representing each level of the hierarchy, from the highest level (Category) to the lowest (Sub-Category or Item), plus a final column for the numerical values you want to plot.

Let's use a business scenario: You're analyzing annual revenue based on the division, department, and specific marketing channel.

Your data needs to look like this:

Hierarchical Structure Example:

Each row defines a unique path from the outermost category to an innermost value. Importantly, the higher-level categories (like 'Sales') need to be repeated for each of their sub-categories for Excel to understand the grouping.

Step 2: Create a Sunburst Chart in Excel (The Manual Way)

Once your data is perfectly structured, creating the chart in Excel is surprisingly simple. This chart type is available in Excel 2016 and newer versions.

1. Select Your Data

Click and drag your cursor to highlight your entire data table, including the headers. In our example, you would select A1:D9.

2. Insert the Sunburst Chart

With your data selected, navigate to the Insert tab on the Excel ribbon. In the Charts group, click on the "Insert Hierarchy Chart" icon. It looks like a small treemap or sunburst chart. From the dropdown, select Sunburst.

Excel will instantly generate a sunburst chart based on your data. The "Division" will be the inner circle, "Department" the middle ring, and "Channel" the outer ring.

3. Customize Your Chart

The default chart is a great start, but you'll want to refine it for clarity. When your chart is selected, two contextual tabs will appear on the ribbon: Chart Design and Format.

• Chart Design Tab: Here, you can change the color scheme, apply a predefined style, or edit which data is included.
• Format Tab: This tab gives you fine-grained control over colors, outlines, effects, and text styling for individual elements of your chart.
• Chart Elements ('+' Button): Click the green plus icon on the top-right of the chart to quickly add or remove a chart title, data labels, and the legend. Data labels are particularly useful for making the chart readable without referencing a legend.

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Using ChatGPT to Do the Heavy Lifting: Data Preparation

Now, let's talk about the more common scenario. Rarely is your data already in that perfect hierarchical format. You usually start with a "flat" data file, like a raw export from your CRM or finance software, which might look something like this:

Typical Raw Data (Messy Format):

To get from this raw transaction log to the neat, aggregated table we need, you would traditionally have to create a Pivot Table in Excel. While powerful, Pivot Tables can be intimidating and require several steps. This is where ChatGPT can save you a ton of time and effort.

The Prompt to Transform Your Data

You can simply paste your raw data into ChatGPT and ask it to restructure and aggregate it for you. The key is to be specific about what you need.

Here’s an effective prompt structure:

Hello! I need to prepare this data for a Sunburst chart in Excel. Here is a sample of my raw data [or, paste the data below]. The goal is to visualize total Revenue based on the following hierarchy: Division > Department > Channel. Please take the raw data I provide and do the following: Here is the data: [Paste your raw data here, e.g., from a CSV or Excel sheet]

ChatGPT will process your request and spit out the perfectly structured and aggregated table. All you have to do is copy it from the chat window and paste it into a blank Excel sheet. The tab-separated format ensures it pastes cleanly into separate columns.

What would have taken several minutes of creating and configuring a Pivot Table now takes less than one minute of copy-pasting. For someone not familiar with Pivot Tables, this process eliminates a massive technical barrier.

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Best Practices for Effective Sunburst Charts

Just because you can make a Sunburst chart doesn't always mean you should. Here are a few tips to ensure your chart is insightful, not just colorful eye candy.

• Keep it Simple: Sunburst charts become hard to read with too many levels. Typically, three to four levels of hierarchy are the maximum you should aim for. Beyond that, the outer ring segments become too small to interpret.
• Focus on Proportions: These charts excel at showing the compositional breakdown of a whole. They're less effective for comparing the absolute values of different segments, especially segments in different parent branches. A bar chart is better for direct comparisons.
• Use Data Labels Wisely: Include data labels displaying the category name and/or value directly on the chart. This makes it instantly readable and frees your audience from having to hunt for information in a legend.
• Consider an Alternative: Sometimes a Treemap chart (also in the Hierarchy chart menu in Excel) can be a better choice, especially if you have a very deep hierarchy or long category names. Treemaps use nested rectangles, which can sometimes provide a cleaner use of space.

Final Thoughts

Building a Sunburst chart in Excel is a powerful way to bring hierarchical data to life. While the manual chart creation is simple, the biggest challenge is always the data preparation. By using an AI tool like ChatGPT, you can automate the tedious task of structuring and aggregating your data, turning a lengthy process into a quick copy-and-paste job.

While this method is a huge step up from manual spreadsheet work, it still requires jumping between applications and some manual handling. At my company, we built an AI data analyst to eliminate these steps entirely. With Graphed , you can connect directly to your data sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, or Salesforce, and simply ask in plain English, "Create a sunburst chart showing revenue by division, department, and channel." It generates a live, interactive dashboard instantly, without you ever having to see, format, or pivot a single cell.