Excel 2010 Bible

Chapter 18: Getting Started Making Charts

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Caution
The values used in a pie chart must all be positive numbers. If you create a pie chart that uses one or more
negative values, the negative values will be converted to positive values — which is probably not what you
intended! n

You can “explode” one or more slices of a pie chart for emphasis (see Figure 18.21). Activate the

chart and click any pie slice to select the entire pie. Then click the slice that you want to explode

and drag it away from the center.

On the CD
A workbook that contains the charts in this section is available on the companion CD-ROM. The file is named
pie charts.xlsx.

FIGURE 18.21

A pie chart with one slice exploded.

The pie of pie and bar of pie chart types enables you to display a secondary chart that provides

more detail for one of the pie slices. Figure 18.22 shows an example of a bar of pie chart. The pie

chart shows the breakdown of four expense categories Rent, Supplies, Miscellaneous, and Salary.

The secondary bar chart provides an additional regional breakdown of the Salary category.

The data used in the chart resides in A2:B8. When the chart was created, Excel made a guess at

which categories belong to the secondary chart. In this case, the guess was to use the last three data

points for the secondary chart — and the guess was incorrect.

To correct the chart, right-click any of the pie slices and choose Format Data Series. In the dialog

box that appears, select the Series Options tab and make the changes. In this example, I chose Split

Series by Position and specified that the Second Plot Contains the Last 4 Values in The Series.