I've been using Excel for years and am going absolutely nuts trying to make a simple pie chart.
Let's say I have a text column
Apple
Orange
Cherry
Cherry
Apple
From the above I want to create a simple chart that show 3 slices and the percentages. How is this done?
Many thanks!
ps. Excel 2010
Charts cannot be build from text. Charts are fed by numbers. You need to have numbers to build a chart. Text is just a label.
If your data sample indicates that each text is one part of the whole, there are five text entries, so each of them represents one fifth of the whole. You can use a formula to calculate the percentages for each item, or you can simply build a separate table and count the items
amount Apple 2 Orange 1 Cherry 2
This is data that you can use in a chart. There are many ways to aggregate data, for example with functions like Countif() or with a pivot table, if you have lots of data.
Attached is a file with both options at work.
Last edited by npamcpp; 06-07-2012 at 06:11 AM.
Thanks very much for this. I was able to work with the countifs you provided though was frustrated that it had to be done. Unfortunately I had a lot of categories so it was a good hour or so of manual data entry... yeah, it wasn't just a couple different fruit flavors :-)
Unless I'm a weirdo I would imagine others would need to perform quick pie charts from surveys and so on and I'm surprised that Microsoft doesn't have a canned solution for this
They do. That's what pivot tables and pivot charts are for. It took me less than 7 clicks to create the pivot table AND the chart.
Even without pivot table/chart you could have used the Remove Duplicates feature to get a unique list of items. Then a simple formula copied down would have given you your chart data.
Also, if there really are many unique items you might want to consider an alternative chart to pie.
if you have a lot of categories you shouldn't use a pie chart. they are really hard to read. a bar chart is a better choice.
Josie
if at first you don't succeed try doing it the way your wife told you to
Andy, looking at the profile, rasiel is using 2003, so "remove duplicates" is not available.
rasiel, you could use Advanced Filter to create a list of unique values thus: Data > Filter > Advanced Filter > Copy to another location, and tick Unique records only
See PS at end of first post.
Many thanks!
ps. Excel 2010
Duh!
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