How to Make a Pie Chart in Google Sheets

A pie chart is one of the quickest ways to show how different parts make up a whole, and Google Sheets makes creating one incredibly simple. A good pie chart can instantly tell a story about market share, budget allocation, or website traffic sources without needing a lot of explanation. This guide will walk you through exactly how to create, customize, and perfect a pie chart in Google Sheets.

When Should You Use a Pie Chart?

Pie charts shine when you need to visualize proportions. Their entire purpose is to represent components of a single whole, with each slice showing its percentage of the total. Think of it like a pizza - you can immediately see which slice is biggest.

They are most effective in these situations:

• Showing composition: If you want to visualize the breakdown of a single total number. For example, how different traffic sources contribute to your total website sessions.
• Few categories: They work best with a small number of categories, ideally six or fewer. Any more than that, and the slices become too small to read, defeating the purpose.
• Significant differences: The comparison is most impactful when the proportions of the slices are clearly different. Trying to compare 33% vs. 34% in a pie chart is nearly impossible for the human eye to distinguish.
• The parts MUST add up to 100%: Each slice must be a part of the whole pie. If your categories are independent and don't contribute to a single, complete total, a pie chart is the wrong choice.

When to Steer Clear of a Pie Chart

Just as important as knowing when to use a pie chart is knowing when not to. Using the wrong chart can confuse your audience and misrepresent your data. Avoid pie charts for:

• Comparing data over time: If you want to show how traffic from different channels changed month-over-month, a line chart is a much better choice. Stacking multiple pie charts next to each other is cluttered and makes trends very hard to spot.
• Comparing multiple sets of data: To compare the marketing budget breakdown for three different product lines, you're better off using a stacked bar chart or a grouped bar chart.
• When precision is critical: It's difficult to accurately judge the relative sizes of pie slices, especially when they are similar. If small differences are important, a bar chart or even a simple table is more effective.

Step 1: Get Your Data Ready for Google Sheets

The foundation of a good chart is clean, well-structured data. For a pie chart in Google Sheets, you need a simple, two-column layout. One column holds your qualitative categories (the labels for your slices), and the other holds their corresponding quantitative values (the numbers that determine the size of the slices).

Your data should be organized like this:

• Column A: Categories. These are your labels. For a marketing campaign report, this might be "Organic Search," "Paid Ads," "Email Marketing," etc.
• Column B: Values. These are the corresponding numbers for each category. An example would be the number of leads generated by each marketing channel.

Here’s a sample dataset showing the breakdown of website sessions by source. This is the perfect format for creating a pie chart.

Make sure you have clear headers for each column (e.g., "Channel" and "Sessions"). Google Sheets will use these headers as the default title for the chart and legend, saving you a step later.

Step 2: How to Create Your Pie Chart (The Easy Part)

With your data correctly formatted, building the actual chart takes only a few seconds. Google Sheets does most of the heavy lifting for you.

1. Select Your Data: Click and drag your mouse to highlight all the cells containing your data, including the headers in both columns. In our example, you would select cells A1 through B6.
2. Insert the Chart: Navigate to the top menu and click Insert > Chart.
3. Choose the Pie Chart Type: If Google Sheets didn't default to a pie chart, don't worry. The Chart editor pane will appear on the right side of your screen. Under the Setup tab, find the "Chart type" dropdown menu. Scroll down to the "Pie" section and select the standard pie chart.

And that's it! A basic pie chart representing your data will instantly appear on your spreadsheet. Now you can move on to making it look polished and professional.

Step 3: Customize Your Pie Chart to Make it Shine

A default chart gets the job done, but a customized one tells a clearer story. The "Chart editor" is your command center for all customizations. If you've closed it, just double-click on your chart to bring it back. Switch from the "Setup" tab to the "Customize" tab.

Here's how to edit the most important elements:

Chart style

This is where you can change the overall appearance of your chart. You can adjust the background color, the font for all text on the chart, and change the chart border color. There’s also an option to make your chart 3D. While a 3D effect can look stylish, use it with caution - it can sometimes distort the visual proportions of the slices, making it harder for viewers to compare them accurately.

Pie chart settings

This dropdown contains options specific to the pie chart itself:

• Doughnut hole: This lets you turn your pie chart into a doughnut chart, which many people find more aesthetically pleasing. You can set the hole's size as a percentage (a value between 25% and 75% usually looks best).
• Border color: You can add a subtle border between the slices to help distinguish them more clearly. A simple white or light gray border works well.
• Slice label: This is a powerful feature. By default, viewers have to look at the legend to know what each slice represents. Instead, you can add labels directly onto the chart. You can choose to display the category name (Label), the Value, the Percentage, or a combination. Displaying the percentage directly on each slice is often the most effective way to communicate your data quickly. You can also customize the label's font, size, and color here.

Chart & axis titles

Your chart needs a clear, descriptive title. Google Sheets likely pulled one from your column headers, but you can refine it here. Click on "Chart & axis titles," select "Chart title" from the dropdown, and enter your text. You should also change the title font size and color to make it stand out. A good title tells the viewer exactly what they're looking at, like "Website Sessions by Source - Q3 2023."

Series

The "Series" section gives you control over the individual slices of your pie. Here, you can change the color of each slice to match your brand's palette or to highlight a specific category. Simply click the dropdown menu, select the category you want to change (e.g., "Organic Search"), and choose a new color from the palette. For better readability, you can also adjust the "Distance from center," which explodes a specific slice out from the rest of the pie to draw attention to it.

Legend

A legend helps your audience connect the colors of your pie slices to the categories they represent. Under the "Legend" section, you can change its position (top, bottom, left, right), or remove it entirely if you've decided to label your slices directly. For pie charts, moving the legend to the right or bottom often creates a cleaner look.

Final Thoughts

Creating a polished pie chart in Google Sheets is a direct process of preparing your data in two columns, inserting a chart, and using the robust customization options to refine its appearance. It's an excellent skill for turning raw numbers into an easy-to-understand visual story for your reports and presentations.

While making charts in spreadsheets is great, all the manual exporting and formatting becomes tedious when you’re pulling data from multiple places like Google Analytics, your ad platforms, and your CRM week after week. We built Graphed to eliminate that friction. By connecting directly to your tools, you can simply ask for the visual you need - like, "Create a pie chart showing Shopify sales distribution by product category for last quarter" - and get a live, real-time dashboard in seconds, not hours.