How to Make a Radar Chart in Google Sheets
Radar charts are a fantastic way to display performance or attribute data across several different categories in one compact visual. When you need to compare a few items - like products, employees, or marketing campaigns - across the same set of variables, a radar chart can quickly show strengths and weaknesses at a glance. This guide will walk you through exactly how to set up your data and create a polished radar chart in Google Sheets.
What Exactly is a Radar Chart?
A radar chart, also known as a spider chart, web chart, or star plot, is a circular graph used to display multivariate data. It consists of multiple axes, called "spokes," that radiate from a central point. Each spoke represents a different quantitative variable or category.
A line is then drawn connecting the data points on each spoke for a given item, forming a polygon. When you plot multiple items on the same chart, you get multiple overlapping polygons, making it easy to see how they stack up against each other across all categories simultaneously.
Imagine you're evaluating three job candidates based on five core skills: Communication, Leadership, Technical Skill, Experience, and Teamwork. A radar chart would use five spokes (one for each skill). Each candidate would have their own colored polygon on the chart, with the vertices showing their score for each skill. The shape and size of each candidate's polygon would immediately give you a visual profile of their strengths and weaknesses relative to the others.
When Should You Use a Radar Chart?
Radar charts are effective, but they excel in specific situations. They are most powerful when your goal is to compare the profiles of a few subjects rather than showing precise values.
Here are the best times to use a radar chart:
- Comparing Performance Metrics: They are perfect for performance reviews, showing how an employee, a team, or even a product measures up to a benchmark across key performance indicators (KPIs). The resulting shape quickly highlights where performance is strong versus where it needs improvement.
- Visualizing Feature Sets: When comparing products or services, a radar chart can show how different options perform across a standard set of features like price, durability, ease of use, and customer support.
- Identifying Outliers and Gaps: The shapes created by radar charts make it easy to spot imbalances. For instance, you could analyze a marketing campaign's performance across channels (e.g., Social Media, Email, SEO, PPC), and a skewed shape would instantly reveal which channels are over or underperforming.
- Tracking Progress: By overlaying two radar charts from different time periods for the same subject (e.g., Q1 vs. Q2 sales performance), you can visually track improvement or decline across all measured categories.
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When to Avoid Radar Charts
While useful, radar charts are not a one-size-fits-all solution. They have limitations that can make them misleading if used improperly.
- Too Many Variables: If you have more than 8-10 variables (spokes), the chart becomes cluttered and almost impossible to read. The angles between the axes become too small, distorting the visual representation of the data.
- Too Many Subjects (Series): Trying to compare more than 3 or 4 subjects on one radar chart results in a tangled mess of lines often called a "spaghetti chart." It becomes very difficult to distinguish one polygon from another, defeating the purpose of a clear visual comparison.
- Variables on Different Scales: If one of your variables is measured on a scale of 1-10 and another is 1-10,000, the chart will be completely skewed. The variable with the larger scale will dominate the visual, making variations in the smaller-scale variables invisible. To use a radar chart in this case, you must first normalize the data (e.g., convert all values to a common scale like 0 to 100).
- Presenting Precise Values: Radar charts are great for showing overall profiles and patterns but poor for a precise comparison of values. A bar chart is usually better for comparing exact magnitudes between categories.
How to Prepare Your Data for a Google Sheets Radar Chart
The most important step in creating a good radar chart is structuring your data correctly. Google Sheets needs the data in a specific format to understand how to plot the spokes and the data series. Here's what you need to do: Your table should have your categories (the chart spokes) in the first column. Each subsequent column should represent a different subject or data series you want to compare.
Here’s the most critical trick: you must repeat the first category row at the very end of your data. This tells Google Sheets to close the polygon shape, connecting the last data point back to the first one. If you skip this step, your radar chart's shape will be left open, which looks awkward and incomplete.
Let's use an example of comparing two basketball players, Alex and Ben, across different skills:
Your data in Google Sheets should look like this:
Notice how "Scoring" is listed at both the beginning and the end of the Skill column, with the corresponding scores repeated. This ensures Alex's and Ben's polygons will be complete, closed shapes.
Step-by-Step Guide: Making a Radar Chart in Google Sheets
Once your data is formatted correctly, creating the chart is just a few clicks away.
Step 1: Select Your Data
Click and drag your cursor to highlight the entire data range, including the headers and the repeated first row at the bottom. In our example, you would select cells A1 through C7.
Step 2: Insert the Chart
With your data selected, navigate to the Google Sheets menu and click Insert > Chart.
Step 3: Choose the Radar Chart Type
Google Sheets will automatically insert a chart it thinks is best, which is usually not a radar chart. In the Chart editor pane that appears on the right, find the Chart type dropdown menu. Scroll down to the section labeled "Other" and select "Radar chart."
Instantly, your data will be transformed into a radar chart. You should now see a basic chart with two colored polygons representing Alex and Ben.
How to Customize Your Radar Chart
The default chart is functional, but you'll want to customize it to make it clearer and more professional. Use the "Customize" tab in the Chart editor pane to make these changes.
Chart & Axis Titles
Under the "Chart & axis titles" section, you can give your chart a descriptive name, like "Player Skill Analysis." You can also edit the title for the vertical axis, though this is often unnecessary for radar charts unless the units need clarification (e.g., "Skill Rating Out of 10").
Series
This is where you can adjust the appearance of each player's data line. You can select which series to edit from the "Apply to all series" dropdown.
- Color: Change the color of each polygon to improve contrast and readability.
- Line thickness: Make the lines thicker for better visibility.
- Point size and shape: Add markers (points) to each vertex of the polygon to make the data points stand out. You can change their size and shape (circle, triangle, star, etc.). This is especially useful for viewers who are colorblind.
Legend
The legend tells the viewer what each color represents. In the "Legend" section, you can change its position (e.g., to the Top, Bottom, or Right) and format the text font and size.
Gridlines and Ticks
This section gives you control over the concentric circles and axis scale.
- Vertical axis: Here you can set a minimum and maximum value. For example, if your skill ratings are on a scale of 1-10, setting the minimum to 0 and the maximum to 10 will prevent Google Sheets from auto-scaling the axes in a weird way.
- Gridlines: Add or remove the concentric circular gridlines. You can also change the number of gridlines (called "Major step") to make the chart more or less dense. Changing the gridline color to a light gray can make the data polygons stand out more.
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Bonus Pro Tip: Normalize Your Data When Necessary
What if you want to compare metrics with wildly different scales, like Website Clicks (in thousands) and Conversion Rate (a single-digit percentage)? If you plot this directly, the Clicks axis will be so large that the Conversion Rate data will be squashed against the center and appear to have no variation.
The solution is normalization. This means converting all your variables to a common scale, like 0 to 100. A simple way to do this is using the "percent rank" concept.
The formula for normalizing a value is:
=(Value - MIN) / (MAX - MIN)You would calculate the minimum and maximum for each category (Clicks, Conversion Rate) across all subjects being compared. Then, apply that formula to create a new set of normalized values (from 0 to 1, which you can multiply by 100 to get a percentage). Use this new, normalized data to build your radar chart, ensuring each variable is given equal visual weight.
Final Thoughts
Radar charts pack a lot of comparative information into a single, straightforward visual. While they require careful data setup in Google Sheets — especially remembering to repeat that first row — the payoff is a chart that clearly highlights profiles, strengths, and imbalances for easy analysis.
Of course, prepping data and navigating customization menus is part of the standard process for spreadsheets. We built Graphed to remove these manual steps. Instead of formatting tables and clicking through settings, you can connect your data sources (like Google Analytics, Shopify, or even a Google Sheet) and just ask for what you want in plain English. You could say, "Create a radar chart comparing campaigns A, B, and C by clicks, conversions, and cost," and get a live, interactive visualization in seconds without any of the setup.
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