Move Small Pie Slices To Second Chart

July 10, 2023 - by Bill Jelen

Problem: All of the tiny pie slices really make the chart hard to comprehend.

A pie chart has four major wedges, then 7 tiny wedges. The small wedges are hard to read. — Figure 1177. Everything under 10% is noise.

The pie chart with four large wedges and then an Other wedge that explodes to a bar chart showing the 9 smaller values. — Figure 1178. The secondary chart shows detail of all the small slices.

Strategy: Excel offers two chart types that will take the small wedges to a secondary chart. To make these look right, you should always plan on tweaking the settings.

Choose the pie chart. Select Design, Change Chart Type. Choose the Bar of Pie icon.

Change the pie chart type to Bar of Pie. This lets you move the smaller wedges to a secondary chart. — Figure 1179. There must be a better name.

Double-click the secondary chart and choose Format. You have choices on how Excel will split points to the secondary axis. The first dropdown offers Position, Value, Percentage Value, and Custom. With custom, you can choose each data point and specify if it is in the first or second plot. An easier choice is to choose Percentage Value. Move everything that is below 10% to the secondary plot.

In the Series Options, choose to Split Series by: Percentage Value. The Second plot contains all values less than 10%. You can change the split method and the boundary. — Figure 1180. Adjust which items are in secondary plot.

You can control the size of the secondary plot. It starts at 75% of the size of the pie. If those small slices are unimportant, make it smaller. However, if you need to see the detail of those small items, you can go up to 200% of the size of the pie chart.

The second plot size is set to 95%. A slider lets you change this percentage. — Figure 1181. These percentages are relative to the first pie.

Gotcha: I had to choose individual labels near the bottom of the column and resize just those labels to prevent overlapping. To select individual labels, you can click one label to select all labels, then a second click to select one label. Then, use the right arrow key to move from label to label.

This article is an excerpt from Power Excel With MrExcel

Title photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash