Dealing with data, and visualizing that information is an important business skills. Today, I’m going to run you through the steps to turn an 2×8 range of data into a pie-chart.

Creating pie-chart reports in excel

0. Understand the purpose of this data. For me time, and money management are the biggest uses of excel – and since I cannot possibly remember
everything I did last week, I can use these visualization as a summary of where my time went.
1. Get data, excel wont work without lots of variable data. This could be as simple as the 8 numbers I’m using, or as complex as one several thousand
line data-set I found at Data.gov.  In this case, we’re going to use the simple summary of how much time I spent on a task.
2. Name the data, in programming this has been described as one of the most difficult tasks, but as they always use to tell me in the military –
K.I.S.S. – keep it simple. My first row will display the header category, and all the sub-categories under it.
3. Add a second column header name weekly time total, and insert the data.
4. Insert the value into each category, I  spend 10 minutes in cat 1, 5 minutes in cat 2, etc.
5. Once you have named and put value to you data-range we simply select the 2×8 range and mouse to the insert ribbon at the top.
6. With you range selected click the Pie-chart within the charts banner. Select your favorite illustration and done.
7. Enjoy your simple data visual with a cup of DeathWish Coffe!