Recipe for a Donut Bar Chart

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We all know that bar charts can be used to display values spread across various categories or times. We also know that pie charts / donut charts can be used to display percentage breakup of various quantities in a sum total. How about mashing up both to create a Donut Bar chart?

“oh, donut what?!? It sounds like a brand new junk food from dunkin’ donuts”

Well, not really. It is a mash-up or combo chart using which you can display, for eg. sales over last few years along with percentage break-up of individual products. See below to understand.

Use Donut Bar Charts to Display Product-wise Breakups in Sales

In the above chart we have mixed a bar chart with a donut chart and sprinkled it generously with a scroll bar form control.

In this charting tutorial, we will learn how to cook a donut bar chart using Microsoft Excel. Scroll down the page to get the downloadable workbook to see this in action.

Recipe for making a donut bar chart

A good donut bar can be healthy while adding variety to your regular menu of charts. To make a neat looking donut bar chart, just follow the recipe.

Ingredients:

Sales data (finely chopped – year vs product level), one donut chart, one bar chart, one scroll bar form control and 5 minutes of spare time.

Step 1: Get your dough, err, data ready

As with any chart, we need the right data in right format to make a perfect donut bar chart.

I have arranged the data for our chart in the below format.

Data and Format for Donut Bar Chart

The last column shows the values as per scroll bar position. (more on this in the next steps)

Step 2: Insert a scroll bar control and link it to a cell

Scrollbar settings for Donut Bar ChartGo to developer ribbon tab and insert a scroll bar form control. (learn more about turning on developer toolbar in excel 2007)

Once you have the scroll bar, link it to a cell, say B18.

Also, set the scroll-bar minimum value as 1, maximum value as the number of years you have (in our case it is 14) and incremental change to 1.

Step 3: Determine product-wise breakups and totals based on scroll bar selection

We can use INDEX() excel formula to do this.

What is INDEX excel formula?

INDEX formula (examples) returns a specific value from a range of cells by taking the row and column of that range as input. For eg. =INDEX(A1:C10,2,1) will return the value in 2nd row, 1st column, ie, the value in cell A2.

So, how to write the INDEX formula in our case?

That is your home work. Just use the kitchen sink to experiment.

Once you are done, the product-wise breakups should be listed in a tabular format like this.

Scrollbar settings for Donut Bar Chart

Step 4: Put everything together and boil for a minute

We have done all the ground work required to make the donut bar chart. Now, We just need to put everything together and make some charts. Here we have 4 small steps.

steps for making donut bar chart

  1. Insert a donut chart using the product-wise breakup data
  2. Insert a bar chart with the yearly totals
  3. Insert another series in the bar chart to show the selected year total. Completely overlap this series with the totals series.
  4. Position everything together.

Finally adjust formatting and colors as per your taste.

That is all, the donut bar is ready for consumption. Serve hot or chilled. The donut bar tastes great with a cup of coffee.

Download the donut bar chart excel work book and play with it

Click here to download the donut bar chart template & workbook. Change the values and chart attributes to understand how this works.

Also try a Bar Pie chart, just follow the same recipe, but replace donut with pie.

Please tell me how your donut bar tasted using comments. 🙂

Recommended charting tutorials for you:

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30 Responses to “Rescue oddly shaped data – Battle between Formulas, VBA and Power Query”

  1. MF says:

    Nice use of Power Query! Power Query is simply awesome! But somehow a lot of people are punishing themselves by not using it (not learning it).

    An imperfect 4th approach for consideration... no codes at all...
    Select myrange.
    Go to Special --> Blank
    Delete Cell --> Shift cell left
    90% done... now we just need to move the data of 2nd column to the bottom of 1st column
    Of course... Power Query is the best.
    Cheers,

  2. There is another way but it involves multiple steps:
    Copy the values in column E, move the cursor to F5, Paste Special with Skip Blanks, OK
    Copy the values in column D, move the cursor to F8, Paste Special with Skip Blanks, OK
    And so on.
    This works perfectly, albeit a little clumsily apart from the values in B17 and C16, which can be moved with simple copy and paste

  3. Robson says:

    Power Query Forever! I do not know how I survived for so long without knowing and using this tool, I can not recommend it to my colleagues, but by the way they prefer to suffer to learn.

    My congratulations here from Brazil.

  4. Haz says:

    I rolled my eyes when I saw that data

    Using decimal places is a nice trick to order data, thanks for that

    And tweaking the first formula a bit, you can use OFFSET instead of INDIRECT

    =OFFSET($A$1, MIN(IF(myrange, ROW(myrange)), ROWS(A$1:A1))-1, RIGHT(TEXT(MIN(IF(myrange, ROW(myrange) + COLUMN(myrange)*0.00001), ROWS(A$1:A1)), ".00000"), 5)-1)

    • Michael Connor says:

      Tried the above formula with the downloaded oddly shaped data file and I could not get it to work. I get #value without ctrl+shift+enter, and #ref with ctrl+shift+enter.

      • Haz says:

        Sorry, it was SMALL, not MIN.
        Add with CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER.

        • Michael Connor says:

          Thank you for your formula. Like the indirect formula I tested this one in older versions of EXCEL and it worked without ALTERATION in EXCEL 95. Very impressive.

  5. Bertie Hechter says:

    Too complicated

    Use =Sum to summarize all the sells to the left and Bobs Your Uncle

  6. Michael Connor says:

    I tested this formula in versions of Excel all the way back to Excel 95

    =IF(ISERROR(INDIRECT("R"&SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(MyRange"",ROW(MyRange)+COLUMN(MyRange)*0.00001),ROWS(A$1:A9)),"00000.00000"),".","C"),FALSE)),"",(INDIRECT("R"&SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(MyRange"",ROW(MyRange)+COLUMN(MyRange)*0.00001),ROWS(A$1:A9)),"00000.00000"),".","C"),FALSE)))

    So there are multiple ways of cleaning up messy data by formulas.

    • Chandoo says:

      Wow.. Excel 95. Who knew people still use that. But as you have shown, Excel has all these beautiful and powerful functions for 23 years. It has data sciency stuff before DS was even a thing.

      • Michael Connor says:

        I had a problem with pasting the formula in the original post.
        Formula should be: =IF(ISERROR(INDIRECT("R"&SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(myrange"",ROW(myrange)+COLUMN(myrange)*0.00001),ROWS(A$1:A1)),"00000.00000"),".","C"),FALSE)),"",(INDIRECT("R"&SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(myrange"",ROW(myrange)+COLUMN(myrange)*0.00001),ROWS(A$1:A1)),"00000.00000"),".","C"),FALSE)))

        EXCEL even in a 16 bit version, is a very robust and capable program.

  7. Michael Connor says:

    I don't like the VBA code. If you have a blank row in MyRange, the last entry in the range is doubled up in the paste.here range.

    • Chandoo says:

      Not really. The macro is writing one cell at a time from paste.here. You have to clean the range before, which I was too lazy to write. But a line like Range(range("paste.here"), range("paste.here").end(xldown)).clearcontents should do the trick.

      • Michael Connor says:

        Adding Range(range("paste.here"), range("paste.here").end(xldown)).clearcontents fixed the problem.

  8. A Rakesh Patro says:

    for step split column by delimiter i am not getting option of split into rows or columns. Can you help me in this

  9. Marc says:

    Thanks Chandoo for promoting Power Query.

    To simplify further, you can "Unpivot Columns" instead of right click on the newly created column and split it by comma in to rows in step 3 of Power Query.

  10. johan says:

    i used

    =LOOKUP(10000,B5:F5)

    and got the answers. I just plagiarized this formula somewhere and use it, maybe you can explain why it works.
    Regards

    • Chandoo says:

      @Johan... I am not sure if the formula works correctly. When I tested it with the sample data in this post, it showed #N/As in two cells. Essentially, it will only give first value in each row. So if a row has multiple values, then subsequent values are missed. LOOKUP() function goes thru a list and finds the first value that is less than or equal to the input - in this case 10000 in B5:F5.

  11. Ben says:

    I have the need to convert pdf's to excel on occasion and they often come out a mess like this. I have used:

    Cell G2 =COUNT(myrange)
    Cell G3 =IFERROR(IF(G2-1<1,"",G2-1),"") copied down to G100
    Cell H2 =IFERROR(LARGE(myrange,G2),"") copied down to H100

  12. Patrick says:

    Waouw...

    =IFERROR(INDIRECT("R" & SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(myrange "", ROW(myrange) + COLUMN(myrange)*0.00001),
    ROWS(A$1:A1)), "00000.00000"), ".", "C"), FALSE), "")

    but CTRL Shift Enter with {} before and after 🙂 😀

  13. Peter B says:

    Another possibility.
    This assumes that you have a row index 'k' to use in the SMALL function and a column index 'h' to identify the columns of 'myRange'.
    If you define 'coord' to refer to
    =k+h/10 [assuming h<10]
    then it will be possible to recover values later based upon location within 'myRange'. The formula 'nb' that identifies non-blanks by coordinates is given by
    = SMALL( IF(myRange"", coord), k )
    Finally, to unpick the pieces
    = INDEX( myRange, INT(nb), 10*MOD(nb, 1) )

  14. Peter B says:

    Whilst I am here and making trouble the PQ solution is also a tad over-complicated. All that is needed is to unpivot the entire table and remove the Attribute column.

    The advanced editor would show
    let
    Source = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="myRange"]}[Content],
    #"Unpivoted Columns" = Table.UnpivotOtherColumns(Source, {}, "Attribute", "Value"),
    #"Removed Columns" = Table.RemoveColumns(#"Unpivoted Columns",{"Attribute"})
    in
    #"Removed Columns"

  15. vivian.liu says:

    1.fill the blank cells with 0
    2.the requested column value=sum of those mess number column
    but this can be used in only one column has value

  16. Juan Carlos Barreto says:

    Chandoo

    And if we use the formula SEARCH (100000000, B5: F5)

    JC

  17. Daniel Dion says:

    Another approach with Power Query, it will still work if the number of columns changed:
    let
    Source = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="myrange"]}[Content],
    #"Added Custom" = Table.AddColumn(Source, "List", each Record.ToList(_)),
    #"Removed Other Columns" = Table.SelectColumns(#"Added Custom",{"List"}),
    #"Expanded LIst" = Table.ExpandListColumn(#"Removed Other Columns", "List"),
    #"Filtered Rows" = Table.SelectRows(#"Expanded LIst", each ([List] null))
    in
    #"Filtered Rows"

  18. Bob says:

    Nowadays, you can just use TOCOL on Excel 2024, MS 365, and Web Excel. It has a parameter to ignore blanks/errors/both.

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