Charts and Graphs - Too Many Slices: Podcast #1287

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This video has been published on Nov 15, 2010.
Today, in Episode #1287, Bill looks at the dilemma of too many slices cluttering your Pie Chart and shows you how to move those smaller slices to their own Chart within the same graphic display. "Charts And Graphs:Microsoft Excel 2010" by Bill Jelen.
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Transcript of the video:
MrExcel podcast is sponsored by Easy-XL.
Excel Charts, Chapter 4; Pie Slices Galore.
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast. I'm Bill Jelen.
Well, you know, a lot of Pie Charts you see they're real nice.
They have 3,4 or 5 slices and everything works out great, but in real life, you know, is just, there's some products that are high fliers other products that you know, they're backless, they're old, we still keep them around.
They sell a few but and not enough and so here's a Pie Chart, 4 items really matter, the rest of the stuff is just, you know tiny little things that no one can really make a lot of sense out of.
So I'm gonna change this chart type, there are six different pie charts to choose from and I'm interested in here, in either something called the Pie of Pie or the Bar of Pie and I'll choose Bar of Pie, in this particular case, choose OK and you see what happens is, the Excel decides to keep some of the slices in the major Pie and then move other slices out to the Secondary Axis.
Now I'm not sure, what the default is here, but I never like it, so I'm gonna right-click and choose Format and we get to control, how to Split this?
Do we split it by Position or do we split it by Value or Percentage Value?
All right so, I'm gonna split it, by value and say that the second plot should contain values less than let's say, a 1000.
And we click OK, take a look at that. Click Close, Okay so now, we have 4 major items in the pie and then the all other, is all of the items less than a 1000.
You have to decide, in your data set, what makes the most sense and then the next thing is, are we really interested in the 4 items or are we interested in the other.
We have a few settings here, so again I'm gonna go back in the Format Data Series and we'll take a look at this Pie Explosion, Gap Width and Secondary Plot Size.
All right so, we can go to a really small Secondary Plot Size compared to the pie and then, you know it's hardly visible at all or sometimes, you might be interested in those all other items and so we can make that even larger than the primary pie, so we can see the detail.
Your call, as far as what you want to do there.
It can also control the gap, the amount of gap between the pies and also, whether they are together or separate.
Now, watch out for this Pie Explosion setting, it is not zero, it's always resets to zero.
This is a bug in this dialogue box, so if I set that to 76, wanna come back in later, it is going to, hey there you have it, a cool way to take all those small slices that are...
Thank you for stopping by. We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
 

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