Pie and Donut Charts.

Pie and donut charts are a great way to show composition. So showing one value as the percentage of a whole.

Ideally, we should only have up to six slices in our pie or donut chart as it becomes a little more difficult to read if we have too much more.

And we can use either/or they both do exactly the same thing a donut chart is just a hollow pie chart.

Neither of them have an axis and we use a legend field instead to plot the data. So we group with the legend field. And again, we use a numeric field or a text field even to count.

And it will automatically then work that out as a percentage of the grand total.

Let's do a workout and see how to create some pie and donut charts in Power BI.

So I'm going to use the Home tab to get some data off an Excel workbook. I'm using module 2 lesson 4B workout.

And I'll select the L4B assets workbook and a worksheet and load that into my report.

So the first thing I'll do is select the fields that I want to use in my visual. So for this example, I'm going to use the Market Value USD fields, and I'm going to group it by asset class 1.

We can see here that Power BI has defaulted to a clustered column chart. That's okay. I'm just going to keep that chart selected move over to the chart types and I'll change it to a pie chart.

And we can see immediately that it has taken each of those values and calculated what they are as a percentage of the total. So I have the value and what it is as a percentage in the chart.

Now we can change that through formatting which we will look at in another module.

But for now, I'm happy with my pie chart. So I'll just move it over to the site and just keep it a little smaller there and then I'll click on to the canvas and I'll just create a second one. So I'm going to use market value and on this case I'm going to use nominal currency.

And again, it's defaulted there to a column but I'm going to change it this time to donut chart.

There we go, and I'll just move it up and we have our donut chart. Again same as a pie chart, i's showing each value as a percentage of the grand total.