Create in-cell pie charts in Excel

Posted on May 7th, 2008 in Charts and Graphs , Learn Excel , hacks , ideas , technology - 18 comments

create cool incell pie charts in excel - nifty trick

Here is a ridiculously easy trick to do nice incell pie charts in excel, what more, they will make you look like a charting wizard.

  1. Download free pie chart font from here (direct download link). The font has 21 pie chart codes starting with empty circle (character ‘a’) and ending with full circle (character ‘u’)
  2. Install the font (just extract the zip file, copy the font file to your fonts folder, click here to learn how to install a font in windows)
  3. Open excel, go to your data table and insert a column where you want incell pie charts
  4. Enter a formula like =CHAR(CODE("a") + ROUND(data cell*21,1)), just replace the data cell with actual cell code.
  5. Finally change the font to “pie charts for maps” from font dialog.
  6. There is no step 6, so go ahead and show off this cool table to your colleagues, make their jaws drop in awe.

You can add some conditional formatting to the pie charts like I did to make it nice.

Feel free to download the sample excel I have prepared to know how to do in-cell pie charts

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Comments
Bhars May 8, 2008

The conditional formatting part comes as the icing on the cake… Great tip, thanks.

Bhars

Akash May 8, 2008

The in cell pie charts concept is not clear to me……the process is not self explanatory..i tried to understand the excel sheet u prepared but failed….i should not learn these concepts while talking to my girlfriend over phone…

Akash

Chandoo May 8, 2008

@Bhars … you are welcome…

@Akash … Welcome to PHD. Can you tell me if you can understand this while you are not talking with your girlfriend.. :D , just kidding.. if you have any doubts feel free to ask… I may know how to answer them :)

John May 9, 2008

Great post ! Thanks for that.
Regards,
John

Chandoo May 12, 2008

@John… you are welcome :)

Champak May 22, 2008

Chandoo, thanks for a wonderful pie charts in a cell trick. If I have a pie chart font which has all the pie from 1% to 100% then do I need to change the formula?

Rgds
Champak

Chandoo May 22, 2008

@Champak … thanks for the comments & welcome to PHD…
Oh yeah, just make sure the formula returns a character code that you can map to your pie chart font.. btw, can you let me know if you come across such font… I may post another tutorial using that font.. :D

Pedro May 6, 2009

Chandoo,

i follow the instructions above, but i getting seven different pies in each cell. what am i doing wrong?
Thanks,

Ethoros December 21, 2009

FYI the formula works better when you multiply by 20 instead of 21.

Bernie January 8, 2010

I am having trouble installing the pie chart font on a Mac G4. It won’t pass the verification step. Do you have another link or different copy?

Chandoo January 8, 2010

@Ethoros: Thanks for the tweak…

@Bernie: I am not aware of any other fonts like this. Also, may be there is a limitation on TTFs in Mac (no idea what I am talking about.. :D ) Can you google for some more fonts and let us know if you find an interesting option that works for Macs as well?

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