Pie Chart Maker

Enter your category labels on the left and their values on the right, then generate an interactive pie or donut chart with percentage labels and a PNG download. The chart is drawn in your browser — your figures are never uploaded.

Entering Labels and Values

Labels go in one per line. Values accept commas, spaces or line breaks, and you can paste a column straight out of a spreadsheet. The two boxes must line up: label three is paired with value three, so a blank line or a leftover header row in the labels box will throw the counts off. If they disagree, the tool tells you both totals rather than guessing.

Four controls change how the chart reads. Donut mode cuts a hole in the centre and reveals a hole-size slider (0.1 to 0.8, defaulting to 0.4). Show percentages appends each slice's share of the total to its label. Inside and Outside move the labels between the wedges and the surrounding margin — outside is worth switching to as soon as any slice gets thin enough that its text no longer fits. The camera icon in the chart toolbar exports a 2000 × 1200 PNG.

The Three Conditions a Pie Chart Requires

A pie chart makes one specific claim: this is how a single whole divides up. That claim only holds if your data meets three conditions, and most bad pie charts break at least one.

1. The categories are parts of one whole. Revenue by region, votes by party, disk space by file type. Not "sales in 2024 and sales in 2025" — those are two wholes, not two parts.
2. They are mutually exclusive. Every unit belongs to exactly one slice. This is where survey data usually fails: a "select all that apply" question produces answers totalling well over 100%, and slicing them into a circle silently misrepresents them.
3. The total is meaningful. Adding your categories together has to produce a number someone cares about. Summing five satisfaction ratings or five monthly growth percentages gives you a number with no interpretation, so the circle is meaningless even though the software will happily draw it.

Negative numbers fail on the geometry as well: a wedge cannot have negative area, so a value like −250 has no slice to draw and simply drops out of the circle. If your data contains negatives — a profit-and-loss breakdown, say — a pie chart cannot represent it and no setting will fix that.

Why Slice Count Is Capped Around Five or Six

The limit is a fact about eyes, not about taste. In the classic 1984 study of graphical perception by William Cleveland and Robert McGill, readers were asked to make the same quantitative judgement using different visual encodings. Judging position along a common scale — which is what a bar chart asks of you — came out most accurate. Angle and area, which are what a pie chart asks of you, ranked well below it.

The practical effect: shown two slices of 22% and 25%, most people cannot reliably say which is bigger. Shown two bars of the same values against a shared baseline, almost everyone can. Percentage labels patch over this, but if the reader has to read the numbers to rank the categories, the geometry is doing no work.

Five or six slices is where a pie stays honest. Beyond that, small categories collapse into slivers, label text collides, and the colour legend becomes the real chart.

When a Bar Chart Is Simply Better

Reach for the bar chart maker instead whenever:

• You have more than six categories, or you need to include a long tail.
• The point is a ranking — who is first, second, third — rather than the split.
• Two categories are close and the difference between them is the story.
• You are comparing the same breakdown across groups or dates. Two pies side by side force the reader to compare angles across a gap; grouped or stacked bars put them on one scale.
• Anything is changing over time, where a line chart shows the trajectory a sequence of pies cannot.

A pie chart earns its place when there are few categories, one dominates, and "roughly half" or "about a third" is the whole message.

Ordering Slices, and the "Other" Bucket

Sort your values largest to smallest and let the biggest slice start at 12 o'clock, running clockwise. The top of the circle is where readers look first, and the vertical edge gives the largest wedge a clean reference line, which makes "is this more or less than half?" easy to answer at a glance.

The exception is data with its own natural order — age bands, or a scale running from strongly agree to strongly disagree. Keep that order and let the sizes fall where they may; scrambling it to sort by size costs more than it gains.

An "Other" bucket rescues a long tail. Roll everything below roughly 3% into one slice and place it last, after the sorted categories, regardless of its size — readers expect a residual to sit at the end, and a stray "Other" in the middle of a sorted sequence looks like a real category. Two checks: if "Other" is larger than your biggest named slice, the grouping is wrong and you are hiding the story inside it, and if the label needs a footnote to explain, it needs to be split.

Donut Charts: What the Hole Is Actually For

Turning on donut mode removes the centre of the circle — precisely the point where all the angles meet. That does not make the chart more accurate; comparing arc lengths is no easier than comparing angles. What it gives you is:

• A place for a headline number. The empty middle is the natural home for the total the slices divide: "£4,000/month", "1,284 responses". A pie has nowhere to put that.
• Breathing room for outside labels. With labels set to Outside, a donut looks less crowded than a pie carrying the same text.
• A lighter visual weight, which matters when the chart sits in a dashboard next to other elements.

Keep the hole moderate. Around 0.3 to 0.5 reads as a donut while leaving each slice enough body to see. Push it to 0.8 and you have a thin ring, where small slices shrink to threads and the shape stops communicating proportion at all.

Charting a Household Budget

A household charting where £4,000 of monthly take-home pay goes. Labels in the left box, values in the right, sorted largest first with the residual last:

The values sum to 4,000 and the shares sum to 100. This data qualifies on all three conditions: every pound lands in exactly one category, the categories cover the whole of one month's pay, and the total is a number the household cares about. Six slices sits right at the ceiling, and "Everything else" at 14% is comfortably smaller than Housing at 35%, so nothing important is buried in it.

Notice you do not have to convert anything to percentages first. Enter the pounds and tick Show percentages, and each slice is labelled with its share of whatever total you supplied.

Mistakes That Survive Into Published Charts

• 3D and exploded slices. Tilting a pie into perspective enlarges the slices at the front. The distortion is not decorative, it is a measurement error baked into the picture.
• Percentages that sum to 99 or 101. Rounding to whole numbers does this routinely. It is not a bug, but if a total is printed alongside, add a "figures may not sum due to rounding" note rather than fudging a slice.
• Similar colours next to each other. Adjacent wedges in near-identical shades are unreadable, and worse for the roughly 1 in 12 men with red–green colour vision deficiency. If two categories must be distinguished, make them obviously different.
• Charting a distribution. Splitting a continuous measurement into ranges and putting them in a circle destroys the shape of the data. Use the histogram maker, which keeps the values on a number line where the shape is visible.