A pie chart is a circle divided into slices. Each slice is usually represented with a percentage or in absolute value to express a part-to-whole relationship between variables. Pie charts can be used with categorical or nominal data, while it does not make sense if your data is continuous.
It’s a good graph to convey the general sense of the part-to-whole relationship in your data and comparing the precise sizes of the slices is less important. If you want to highlight how one variable is over represented in your data then using a pie chart would be a good idea, because it would immediately convey to the audience that there is one slice is cleary predominant. On the other hand, if there are too many slices of small size then a pie chart might end up being confusing.
For example, if we wanted to see the distribution (in percentage or absolute value) of sales among the various departments of a Company, the use of a simple Pie Chart would answer this question perfectly. If we wanted to incorporate information on overall sales into the same visualization, we should then turn to a Donut Charts (guide 13).
Let’s see then how to build a Pie Chart on Tableau step-by-step. Our goal is to create a chart showing sales by product category with the Sample Superstore data.
Step 1: Create a Pie Chart
- Connect to the data source Sample – Superstore.
- Select Pie from the dropdown menu in the Marks card.
- Drag Sales and drop it on Angle in the Marks card.
- Drag Category (under Product) an drop it on Color in the Marks card.
- Fit to Entire View in the toolbar.
Step 2: Add more details
- Drag Category and Sales onto Label in the Marks card to have more information displayed on the pie chart.
- Right click on Sales in the Marks card, select Quick Table Calculation and then Percent of total to have the percentages of sales per category on the chart.
- Right click on Sales in the Marks card again, click on Format. Under the Default section, in Pane select Percentage in the ‘Number’ dropdown menu and reduce the decimal places to 0 if you want round numbers.
- You can make the pie chart bigger by clicking on Size in the Marks card and adjusting it. Done!
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