What is a Sunburst Chart in Excel?

A sunburst chart is one of the most effective and visually appealing ways to display hierarchical data. If you’re trying to show how a whole is broken down into its parts, and then how those parts are broken down even further, a standard pie or bar chart just won't cut it. This article shows you exactly what a sunburst chart is, when it’s the perfect tool for the job, and how to create and customize one yourself in Microsoft Excel.

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What Exactly is a Sunburst Chart?

Think of a sunburst chart as a multi-layered pie chart. It excels at visualizing data that has a parent-child relationship. While a pie chart shows the breakdown of a single category, a sunburst chart can show breakdowns of sub-categories all within the same visualization.

Its structure is simple but powerful:

• The Center Circle (Innermost Ring): This represents the root or the top level of your hierarchy. For example, if you're analyzing sales, this might be "Total Annual Sales."
• The Rings Outward: Each ring moving out from the center represents the next level down in the hierarchy. The ring just outside the center would be the first sub-category (e.g., product categories like "Electronics," "Clothing," "Home Goods"). The next ring out breaks those down further (e.g., "Electronics" splits into "Laptops," "Smartphones," "Headphones").
• The Slices: The size of each slice within a ring is proportional to its value. A larger slice means a bigger contribution to the category in the ring inside it. This makes it easy to spot the biggest contributors at a glance.

The name "sunburst" is pretty fitting - the chart radiates outwards from a central point, with cascading levels looking like rays of sunlight. It provides a comprehensive view of how different components contribute to the overarching whole.

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When Should You Use a Sunburst Chart?

Sunburst charts are fantastic for specific scenarios but can be confusing if misused. The key is to use them when you need to illustrate a "part-of-a-whole" relationship across multiple levels.

Great Use Cases for Sunburst Charts:

• Breaking Down Sales Data: This is a classic example. You can visualize total sales broken down by sales region, then by individual sales agents, and finally by product category sold. It instantly shows which agents in which regions are selling the most of a particular product.
• Analyzing Budget Allocation: See a company’s total budget (center), then how it's divided among departments like Marketing, R&D, and Sales (first ring), and then how each department’s budget is allocated to specific projects or expense types like salaries and software (outer rings).
• Understanding Website Traffic: Visualize your total website sessions broken down by marketing channel (Organic Search, Social Media, Paid), then by source (Google, Facebook, Twitter), and even down to the specific campaign driving the traffic.
• Survey Results Breakdown: If you've run a customer survey, a sunburst chart can show the total respondents segmented by demographics (Age Group), and then by their answers to a specific question (Satisfied, Neutral, Dissatisfied), all in one view.

When to Avoid a Sunburst Chart:

• For Data with Few Levels: If your data only has one or two levels of hierarchy, a sunburst chart is overkill. A simple bar chart or pie chart would be clearer and easier to read.
• To Compare Categories with Precision: The human eye isn't great at comparing the sizes of angled slices. If your audience needs to make precise comparisons between values (e.g., "Category A is exactly 15% larger than Category B"), a treemap or a simple bar chart is a much better choice.
• For Data with Negative Values: Sunburst charts, like pie charts, are based on proportional contribution to a whole, so they cannot display negative numbers.
• When You Have Too Many Levels: While they handle hierarchy well, a sunburst chart with five or more levels becomes cluttered. The outer rings get sliced into tiny, unreadable segments. As a rule of thumb, stick to three or four levels for maximum clarity.

How to Create a Sunburst Chart in Excel: A Step-by-Step Guide

Creating a sunburst chart in Excel is straightforward once your data is set up correctly. This feature is available in Excel 2016 and newer versions, including Microsoft 365.

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Step 1: Structure Your Hierarchical Data

The most important step is organizing your data. The chart's logic is built directly from your spreadsheet's structure. You need to arrange your data in columns, with each column representing a level in your hierarchy, from the highest level on the left to the lowest level on the right. The final column on the right should be for numerical values.

Let's use an example of quarterly product sales. We have two main product lines: "Tech" and "Home." Within "Tech," we sell "Phones" and "Laptops." Within "Home," we sell "Coffee Makers" and "Blenders."

Here's how you'd structure the data in Excel:

Important note: Your data needs to be properly sorted and grouped for the hierarchy to work. Notice how all the "Tech" items are together, and within "Tech," the "Mobile" items are together.

Step 2: Insert the Sunburst Chart

With your data neatly arranged, creating the chart takes just a few clicks.

1. Select your data: Click anywhere inside your data table. Excel is smart enough to detect the entire range automatically. Or, you can click and drag to select all the cells, including the headers.
2. Navigate to the Insert tab: At the top of the Excel ribbon, click on the "Insert" tab.
3. Find the Chart tools: In the "Charts" group, look for a small icon labeled "Insert Hierarchy Chart." It looks like a set of nested rectangles.
4. Choose Sunburst: Click the "Insert Hierarchy Chart" dropdown, and you'll see two options: Treemap and Sunburst. Select "Sunburst."

That's it! Excel will instantly generate a sunburst chart based on your selected data and place it on your worksheet.

Step 3: Customize Your Chart for Clarity

The default chart is a great start, but a little customization goes a long way in making it easy to understand.

• Give It a Meaningful Title: Double-click the default "Chart Title" and type something descriptive, like "Quarterly Sales by Product Category."
• Adjust Data Labels: Labels are essential for a sunburst chart to make sense. Click on the chart to bring up the Chart Design tab. From there, click Add Chart Element > Data Labels > More Data Label Options. This opens a panel on the right. Here you can choose to show the Series Name, Category Name, and Value. Showing both the Category Name and Value can be very helpful, but you may need to deselect some to avoid clutter on the smaller segments.
• Refine the Color Scheme: Excel defaults to coloring by the top-level categories, which is usually what you want. You can change this by going to the Chart Design tab and selecting Change Colors. A palette with high contrast can help differentiate the top-level categories more clearly. You can also right-click on an individual slice and use the Fill option to change its color manually.
• Adjust the Legend: Excel often adds a legend by default, listing the categories from your innermost ring. Since the sunburst chart is often self-explanatory (especially with data labels), you can save space by removing the legend. Simply select it and press the Delete key, or go to Add Chart Element > Legend > None.

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Tips for a More Effective Sunburst Chart

Now that you know how to build one, here are a few tips to make your sunburst charts even better.

1. Keep Hierarchies Limited and Logical: Just because you can add more levels doesn't mean you should. For readability, stick to a maximum of three or four hierarchical levels. Any more than that and the outer ring becomes a chaotic array of tiny, illegible slivers.
2. Group Small Slices: If a category in an outer ring has many small, insignificant sub-items, consider grouping them. For instance, if you have ten individual products that each make up less than 1% of sales for a sub-category, you can lump them together in your data as an "Other" category. This reduces noise and lets the viewer focus on what’s important.
3. Sort Your Data for Visual Order: Before creating the chart, sort your data by the value column (e.g., Sales) in descending order within each parent category. This arranges the chart slices from largest to smallest in a clockwise direction, which can make the chart feel more organized and easier to interpret at a glance.
4. Use It on a Dashboard: A sunburst chart is a powerful summary visual. It works great on an Excel dashboard, giving a high-level overview. You can then use it alongside other charts, like a bar chart, that provide more granular detail when a user needs to compare specific values more precisely.

Final Thoughts

The sunburst chart is an excellent tool in your Excel toolbox for bringing hierarchical data to life. By transforming complex datasets into an intuitive visual format, you make it easy for anyone to see how an organization's resources, sales, or efforts are distributed across multiple layers.

Building one-off charts in Excel is powerful, but modern data analysis often involves connecting live data from multiple sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and your CRM. Pulling all that data manually to build reports is a time-consuming weekly grind. To solve this, we built a tool that automates the whole process. With Graphed , we let you connect your data sources in seconds and then use simple, natural language to create entire real-time dashboards and reports. The manual data wrangling that used to take you hours on Monday morning can now be done in a 30-second conversation.