Pie charts

Pie charts can also be used to show part-to-whole relationships. To create a pie chart in Tableau, change the mark type to Pie. This will give you an Angle shelf, which you can use to encode a measure. Whatever dimension(s) you place on the marks card (typically on the Color shelf) will define the slices of the pie:

Observe that the preceding pie chart uses the sum of revenue to define the angle of each slice; the higher the sum, the wider the slice. The Hospital Branch dimension is slicing the measure and defining slices of the pie. This view also demonstrates the ability to place multiple fields on the Label shelf. The second SUM(Revenue) field is the percent of total table calculation you saw previously. This allows you to see the absolute values of revenue, as well as the percent of the whole.

Pie charts can work well with a few slices. In most cases, more than two or three become very difficult to see and understand. Also, as a good practice, sort the slices by sorting the dimension that defines the slices. In the preceding example, the Hospital Branch dimension was sorted by the SUM of revenue descending. This was done by using the drop-down menu option. This causes slices to be ordered from largest to smallest and allows anyone reading the chart the ability to easily see which slices are larger, even when the size and angles are nearly identical.

Table of Contents for Pie charts

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Table of Contents for
Pie charts